Insects Facts

The Hercules Beetle is remarkable, not only for its strength, able to carry up to 850 times its own weight,  its shell changes from green to black as its surrounding atmosphere gets more humid.

Hercules Beetle
source; science daily

Ants use pheromones for more than just making trails. A crushed ant sends out an alarm pheromone to alert the nearby ants of a possible danger. Several ant species even use "propaganda pheromones" to confuse enemy ants and make them fight among themselves.

Interactive teaching has been observed to be effective in ants only apart from mammals. The follower obtains knowledge through its leading tutor. The leader slows down when the followers lag and speeds up when the follower get too quick.

Southern Giant Darner, an endemic dragonfly species of Australia  is one of the fastest flying odonates, recorded at nearly 97 km/h.  Normally, large dragonflies like the hawkers have a maximum speed of 22–34 mph with average  speed of about 4.5 metres per second


 I can't move my hands for more than 25 times, it starts aching,  but a mosquito can flap its wings for 300-600 times per second.   Mosquitoes fly at speeds between 1 and 1.5 miles per hour.Mosquitoes can detect carbon dioxide from 75 feet away. We cannot underestimate  insects by their  size, we don.t know their ability.


Caterpillars have 12 eyes. The caterpillar can differentiate between light and dark with the help of,  tiny eyelets, called stemmata, 6 of which are on each side of its head, arranged in a semi-circle. it is said to have mosaic vision. It sometimes moves its head from side to side. This most likely helps it judge depths and distances. It has around 4,000 muscles in its body.


Fly eyes have the fastest visual responses in the animal kingdom. A new study shows that their rapid vision may be a result of their photoreceptors -- specialised cells found in the retina -- physically contracting in response to light. The study was published October 11, in the journal Science.


The rain forest insect Katydids or the South American bush cricket, both male and female produce sounds. When they  want to sing, they do so  together by  rubbing  their forewings with each other and they hear each other with ears on their front legs.

Katydid
Source: science daily

Katydid sings at an amazingly high 150 kilohertz  the most ultrasonic singer of any known organism. The katydids must have ultrasensitive ear structures to catch such ultrasonic sound over distances,  a new study published recently in nov in the journal Science. These insects hear a lot like humans do even though their ears may be on their legs.

The authors of the new study, led by Fernando Montealegre-Zapata of the University of Lincoln in England, discovered that the katydid’s ear functions similar to the human ear.

Daniel Robert of University of Bristol in England, one of the study’s lead authors said, katydids have to be able to discriminate between the sound of an incoming hunter and the sound of a singing mate.