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Fun Facts about Bugs
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Houseflies find sugar with their feet, which are 10 million times more sensitive than human tongues. | ||
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Ticks can grow from the size of a grain of rice to the size of a marble. | ||
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Approximately 2,000 silkworm cocoons are needed to produce one pound of silk. | ||
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While gathering food, a bee may fly up to 60 miles in one day. | ||
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Ants can lift and carry more than fifty times their own weight. | ||
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Mexican Jumping Beans, sometimes sold commercially, actually have a caterpillar of a bean moth inside. | ||
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It takes about one hundred Monarch Butterflies to weigh an ounce. | ||
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When the droppings of millions of cattle started ruining the land in Australia, dung beetles were imported to reduce the problem. | ||
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Wasps feeding on fermenting juice have been known to get "drunk' and pass out. | ||
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The queen of a certain termite species can lay 40,000 eggs per day. | ||
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Honeybees have to make about ten million trips to collect enough nectar for production of one pound of honey. | ||
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Insects have been present for about 350 million years, and humans for only 130,000 years. | ||
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Beetles account for one quarter of all known species of plants and animals. There are more kinds of beetles than all plants. | ||
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Blow flies are the first kind of insect attracted to an animal carcass following death. | ||
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The term "honeymoon" comes from the Middle Ages, when a newly married couple was provided with enough honey wine to last for the first month of their married life. | ||
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To survive the cold of winter months, many insects replace their body water with a chemical called glycerol, which acts as an "antifreeze" against the temperatures. | ||
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There are nearly as many species of ants (8,800) as there are species of birds (9,000) in the world. | ||
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The male silk moth is estimated to "smell" chemicals of female silk moths in the air at the ratio of a few hundred molecules among 25 quintillion (25,000,000,000,000,000,000) molecules in a cubic centimeter of air. | ||
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Male mosquitoes do not bite humans, but rather live on plant juices and other natural liquids from plants and decomposing organic material. | ||
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True flies have only one pair of wings, and sometimes, none at all. A hind pair of "wings" is reduced to balancing organs called halteres. | ||
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There are about 91,000 different kinds (species) of insects in the United States. In the world, some 1.5 million different kinds (species) have been named. | ||
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Vladimir Nobokov, a famous Russian author, collected butterflies and actually named as a new subspecies the Kamer Blue Butterfly from the pine barrens of the Northeast United States. | ||
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A particular Hawk Moth caterpillar from Brazil, when alarmed, raises its head and inflates its thorax, causing it to look like the head of a snake. | ||
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About one-third of all insect species are carnivorous, and most hunt for their food rather than eating decaying meat or dung. | ||
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The oldest known fossil of an insect dates back 400 million years and is a springtail. |
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Prepared by the Department of Systematic Biology, Entomology Section, Information Sheet Number 177 NOTE: This publication can be made available in Braille or audio cassette. To obtain a copy in one of these formats, please call or write : Smithsonian Information |
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