Hello, friends!
Today I am answering Lyovushka’s question, which was sent by his mother, Katya, author of the blog “House Forest”. I have had it in stock for a long time, and the time has come to reveal the secrets, the bell is ringing in the magic meadow. Queue new fairy tale, made with great love for living things.Elephant: Friends! I declare the BioTOP meeting open!
Kaffir Raven: BioTOP!
A Meerkat scurries across the clearing, climbs onto a pebble and peers into the distance.
Cheetah: Dear Meerkat, what are you looking for there?
Meerkat: A giraffe should come to visit us today! The plane from Madagascar arrived a long time ago, and it should have been there a long time ago.
Owl: You can see such a tower a mile away. We won't miss the giraffe.
Orangutan: It’s strange that the giraffe is coming to us from Madagascar. Are they found there?
Someone's voice: That's where they are found!
The gazes of those present rose upward. And they saw a bug of the strangest kind in the branches of the tree.
“On a warm spring day, a female pipe roller climbs onto a birch tree and finds a soft leaf. On its upper surface, retreating slightly to the right from the petiole, the beetle digs its sharp jaws into the leaf and, backing away, makes the first cut from here to the vein. It does not lead straight, but along a curved S -shaped line. Lightly bites the midrib and moves to the left half of the leaf. Again, a curved cut leads from the edge to the vein, but it is less curved than the first.
Having finished it, he returns to the starting point, again to the right half of the sheet. It crawls to its lower surface and, quickly moving its legs, rolls the right half of the leaf into a narrow cone of five to seven tight turns. Then, in the same way, the insect rolls the left half of the leaf into a tube. But he turns her around reverse side, around an already twisted cone. It turns out to be a dense green case."
I. Akimushkin “And the crocodile has friends”Octopus: It would be great to try to make such a pipe using real birch leaves.
Cancer: I don’t even understand why insects don’t have a neck, if they have one, in the form of a membrane connection!
Orangutan: The point is what origin the membrane has. If it were from a separate segment, or better yet from several segments, it would receive the status of the cervical spine. As it is, these are just thinned edges of the head and chest.
Cancer: I don’t have a neck at all, and I don’t even have a head, but only a cephalothorax.
And Cancer began to cry.
Octopus: And this will depend on how we measure, dear Chairman. In centimeters, or in vertebrae.
Elephant: In centimeters. A very convenient measuring tool.
Octopus: If one of the living... Then a giraffe - its neck is 3 meters long. Among birds, flamingos probably have 90 cm. But the longest neck was that of the extinct Jurassic dinosaur Mamenchisaurus - 15 meters out of its 22 meters in length.
Meerkat: What if you measure in vertebrae?
Octopus: The giraffe, like you, dear Meerkat, has only 7 cervical vertebrae. All mammals have 7 cervical vertebrae and so do the Monkey, Cheetah, Sperm Whale, Elephant, Orangutan and Human. Only the manatee has 6 of them, and sloths have from 5 to 10, depending on the species.
Monkey(bending your fingers): Wow! It turns out that the giraffe has a vertebra almost half a meter in size! Does a dinosaur also have 7 vertebrae in its neck? Then it turns out that each vertebra was 2 meters?
Octopus: I forgot. It seems there were more vertebrae. But I have notes - here. I wrote with all the tentacles at once, but there are arrows there. And you can look and count.
Elephant:I think that the agenda for today is exhausted. I declare the meeting closed!
Insects are one of the oldest living creatures; they appeared on Earth more than 400 million years ago. Tiny living creatures are so resilient that they can survive any disaster. Even if humanity destroys itself, it is unlikely that it will be able to exterminate insects from the world.
There are more than a million species of insects in the world. This is more than all other animal species combined! And every year entomologists discover another 8 thousand species of insects.
Dragonflies were the first creatures to fly into the air. This happened 320 million years ago, and their wings were then equal in length to the wings of a modern seagull.
Modern dragonflies sit in a cocoon for 2 years, after which they hatch, immediately begin to reproduce, and then die. Some species do not even have a mouth, and males have enough energy for 30 minutes of flight. Females have a little more. Other species are capable of reaching speeds of 65 km/h.
The living creature with the largest brain in relation to its body is the ant.
The world's largest beetle is considered to be the titan lumberjack, reaching sizes of up to 17 centimeters.
Tiny stinging insects, midges, flap their wings with incredible speed- 62760 times per minute.
The dung beetle is capable of moving a weight that exceeds its mass by 90 times. The most powerful animals in the world, in proportion to their size, are considered to be large beetles of the scarab family, living mainly in the tropics.
An aphid measuring 0.5 millimeters can jump so much that if enlarged to the size of a person, it will jump over the Eiffel Tower.
Locusts live underground for 17 years. Then all the individuals crawl out on the same day and breed. On an acre of land at this time there can be up to a million of them.
Insects very accurately determine the temperature of the environment. Thermoreceptors are located either in the antennae or on the paws. With the help of antenna thermoreceptors, insects very accurately determine the heat source and can judge the presence and location of the prey. Moreover, the mosquito will continue to change its body position until both of its antennas receive the same amount of heat. Large bloodsuckers (bugs) use only one antenna to find a victim - turning it in different directions.
A mosquito flies towards the heat. People with more bites more high temperature bodies. The skin of a person walking or running is warmer than that of a person sitting or standing.
A moth monument has been erected in Australia. In the 1920s, a South American cactus spread catastrophically here, and the only one that could cope with it was the introduced Argentine cactus moth, a natural enemy of the plant.
It has long been a known fact that cockroaches can live decapitated for several weeks. And perhaps this is all due to the fact that the cockroach’s blood circulation is not controlled by the brain; it breathes through tiny holes that are located throughout the body, and thanks to what it has already eaten, insects can live for a long time without obtaining food.
Termites create tall towers out of clay where millions of insects find shelter. Each tower has a central pipe through which warm air. This cools and ventilates the termite area.
Mayan warriors used hornet nests (“hornet bombs”) as throwing weapons to create panic in the enemy ranks.
Ants never sleep. There are almost as many species of ants in the world (8,800) as there are species of birds (9,000).
Ticks are capable of not eating for up to 10 years, patiently waiting on the grass and branches of bushes for a living creature passing by.
Caterpillars are the children of butterflies. In butterflies, like many other insects, the appearance. From an egg they turn into a caterpillar, then into a pupa, and then into a butterfly. This process of transformation from larva to pupa to adult is called metamorphosis.
Not all insects change their appearance during development. Baby scale insects, as soon as they hatch from the egg, look the same as their parents, they just get bigger and bigger until they have wings.
Bombardier beetles protect themselves from predators by shooting a boiling-temperature mixture of toxic substances from special glands in their back parts. In at least one species, this mixture is ejected as a pulsating jet. This complex device The beetle is often cited by creationists as evidence of the impossibility of the appearance of this system during evolution.
Grasshopper blood white, lobster - blue.
Water striders are so light that they can glide across the surface of a pond. At the tips of their legs they have hair tassels, which help them not to drown.
The wasp lays its larvae in living butterfly caterpillars. These butterfly caterpillars, when grown, are 800 times heavier than when they hatched. Those in which the larvae, of course, do not grow, since the larvae eat them from the inside, then entangle the skin with silk, spend 2 weeks in a cocoon, and hatch as adult wasps.
The words bull and bee have the same root. The fact is that in the works ancient Russian literature the word bee was written as "bee". Alternation vowels ъ-ы is explained by the origin of both sounds from one Indo-European sound. If we recall the dialect verb buchachat, which has the meaning “roar, hum, buzz” and etymologically akin to words bee, bug and bull, then it becomes clear what it was like general meaning of these nouns - producing a certain sound.
Every year, more people die from bee stings than from snake bites.
Water beetles that live in lakes and ponds are able to breathe underwater.
Ants communicate using smells - their glands produce pheromones in different concentrations for different messages. When an ant dies, it is treated as if it were alive for several more days, until the smell of decomposition products overcomes the pheromones. If you smear a living ant with substances that contain the smell of decomposition, then it will definitely be taken to the cemetery, and will be taken again, no matter how many times it returns from there.
Weaver ants build their homes from leaves. Some ants hold the edges of the leaves, while others seal them with glue. It is secreted by larvae, which the goosebumps carry in their jaws.
Insects orient themselves in flight according to the light. They fix the source - the Sun or the Moon - and maintain constant angle between him and his course, taking a position in which the rays always illuminate the same side. However, if the rays from the heavenly bodies are almost parallel, then from artificial source Light rays diverge radially. And when an insect chooses a lamp for its course, it moves in a spiral, gradually approaching it.
Ants have their own “animal husbandry” - they breed aphids, which suck sap from plants and secrete its excess in the form of sugar-enriched droplets. The aphid sprays this “milk” directly into the ant’s mouth after it massages its abdomen with its antennae. For the “herd” of aphids, ants build shelters that protect them from bad weather and attacks from other insectivores.
Insects are food rich in protein, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals. They are considered a delicacy in Thailand, where fried crickets and locusts are popular.
Tsetse flies attack any moving warm object, even a car. The exception is the zebra, which the fly perceives only as a flickering of black and white stripes.
Pusher flies, like many other insects, have a mating ritual: before mating, the male presents the female with an insect he has caught. And while she eats it, the male can safely impregnate the female. In one of the North American species, the male does not simply give an insect, but wraps it in a beautiful white ball. And the male Moorish tusker weaves a fluttering veil, into which they do not always even weave anything edible.
In many species of fireflies, only the males fly and glow. Females are wingless and worm-like, similar to larvae.
The larvae of blowflies - maggots - are useful not only for fishing. They are used in many medical centers in Europe and the USA to clean wounds from dead tissue and suppuration. The larvae eat away at such places, leaving the wound clean.
The fire borer beetle needs a forest fire to reproduce. When it finds burnt wood, it lays eggs there. The advantage of this method is that at this moment his natural enemies cannot interfere with him, since they themselves are fleeing from the fire. And to detect a fire at a distance of several kilometers, this beetle has a miniature infrared receptor.
In nature, there are moths that replenish fluid loss by sucking tears from sleeping animals. Thus, the Madagascar moth drinks the tears of birds at night, and one butterfly from the noctuid family drinks the tears of crocodiles, deer and other large animals.
If a fire ant falls into water, it will drown within a few hours. However, if many fire ants from one colony are washed into the water, they form a single raft from their bodies - each insect hooks its jaws onto the limbs of the other. This raft does not contain cracks, bends well and can remain afloat for weeks.
In Rus', grasshoppers were called dragonflies.
Scorpions can go without eating anything for almost two years, and ticks can go up to 10 years.
A female cockroach can lay more than two million eggs in a year. In addition, a cockroach can live for nine days without a head.
Analysis of the stomach contents of female mosquitoes caught around settlements 80% of these insects feed on the blood of domestic animals.
The praying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head.
The weight of insects that all the spiders on Earth eat in a year is greater than the combined weight of all people living on the planet.
Mosquitoes are attracted to the smell of people who have recently eaten bananas.
If you play some furious music for termites - for example, heavy metal - they will begin to bite into the tree twice as fast.
Aphids develop into adult insects from eggs in 6 days and live for another 4-5 days.
Insects annually eat 25-30% of the world's crops.
In the eye of a dragonfly there are more than 20 thousand tiny lenses, forming, like pieces of a mosaic, a multifaceted (faceted) surface.
A bee has two stomachs - one for honey, the other for food.
Cross spiders eat their web every morning and then rebuild it.
Did you know that termites have such a strong house that it can only be destroyed with the help of dynamite; stick insects grow as big as a cat; Are there wasps that lay eggs in pots?
Did you know that insects - beetles, ants and everyone else - have three pairs of legs, that is, there are six in total?
The body of insects is divided into three parts: head, thorax and abdomen. The hard outer shell keeps water out of the body and protects the soft internal organs.
Why don't flying insects die in tropical rain? As each raindrop falls, it creates a light breeze, which blows the insects away. It turns out that they are balancing between the drops.
The wings of butterflies are covered with rows of scales that lie just like tiles on a roof. Moreover, each scale is no larger than a speck of dust.
Dragonflies and mayflies begin their lives in water. At this stage of development, their larvae are called nymphs. The larvae can attack fish fry and tadpoles that are larger in size than themselves.
Butterflies' taste buds are on their hind legs. Some other insects also evaluate the taste of food in this way.
Bee sees the world not two, but five eyes at once: two are located in front, three on the “top of the head.” But crickets have ears on their front legs.
If you have a cricket in your house, you don't really need a thermometer. Count how many times the insect chirped in a minute and divide this number by two. Add nine to the result and divide in half again. You will get the exact air temperature in Celsius. No kidding.
A third of all insects are not “vegetarians”: they eat their own kind, drink someone’s blood, or feed on carrion. But there are still more hunters among them than “waste” lovers.
Insects are very nutritious: they contain proteins, minerals, vitamins and carbohydrates necessary for humans. So if you're lost in the forest and can't find lunch, take a closer look at what's crawling and flying around.
Insects are one of the most unstudied animals. Entomologists believe that at least 5,000,000 of their species have not yet been discovered. The writer Vladimir Nabokov, who was fond of entomology and, in particular, butterflies, himself enriched science with several species of winged beauties.
A fly usually does not fly far from the place where it was born. But if it blows strong wind, it can be carried tens of kilometers.
People who see a hummingbird for the first time often mistake it for large insect. Meanwhile, in the world there is a butterfly so large sizes that she looks like a bird. This is an atlas peacock eye that is active at night and has a wingspan of more than 30 centimeters.
Spiders look like insects, but are not insects. Arachnids belong to separate class animals.
The female spider of the amarobia variety is an example of the highest self-sacrifice, because after birth the cubs eagerly eat their own mother.
An example for them would be the Sisyphus theridion spiders: after birth they stay with their mother. First they eat what she has prepared for them, then they themselves help get her food. They accompany the parent until her death, and then... they also eat her and go about their business.
But family relationships the imperial scorpions are very reminiscent of ours: adult children do not always leave their father’s house. Several generations of the same family can live side by side, tolerate each other and go hunting together.
Flies are flying rockets. Try to catch this buzzing “plane” with your bare hands - you’re unlikely to succeed. The speed of an ordinary fly is 6.5 km/h, but a horsefly flies almost four times faster – 22.4 km/h. In addition, flies have an amazing reaction: they dodge danger with lightning speed and remain unharmed.
The flea is a jumping biter. The jump length of this bloodsucking insect is 33 centimeters. If we translate the value in relation to a person, it will be equal to 213 meters! Do you know at least one athlete who can cover such a distance in one jump? That's right - there is no such thing, because people cannot do it, but a flea is as easy as shelling pears.
The giant grasshopper, caught on the border of Malaysia and Thailand, broke all records not only in size (its length was 25.5 cm), but also in long jump. One of his leaps was more than 4.5 meters.
Bees and wasps are real chemical laboratories. No, this is not a joke, it’s just that bee venom consists exclusively of acids, but the wasp is a producer of an alkaline poisonous substance.
If an ordinary forest ant lives for about a year, then in laboratory conditions these insects sometimes live up to 20 years!
A spider that lives in the Namib Desert escapes its enemies by sliding into a hole. He digs these holes for himself. When wasps attack him, he suddenly rushes down the slope of the pit and rolls like a wheel, his speed being 1 m/s.
Medicine ants from the genus Dorylus can not only sting, but also heal wounds, connecting their edges with their powerful jaws. Therefore, local residents actively use them in medicine.
Bumblebees on flowers can be in danger. Female wasps use bumblebees as a food source for their offspring. The wasp flies up to the bumblebee, sits on top of it, pierces its sharp ovipositor and lays several dozen eggs inside the body.
The larvae, hatched from the eggs, begin to feed on their prey from the inside. The little killers secrete special substances that force the bumblebee to burrow into the ground before dying.
Underground, the bumblebee stays fresh longer. In the body of a dead bumblebee, the ichneumon larvae will have to spend the entire winter, and in the spring they turn into adults.
Bumblebees are one of the most cold-resistant insects and can live even in harsh northern conditions. Bumblebees can be found in Greenland, Chukotka and Alaska. Why are bumblebees so cold-resistant? It turns out that their body temperature exceeds the air temperature by 20-30 degrees and averages 40 degrees. This effect is achieved thanks to the work of the pectoral muscles.
By using body lice managed to find out when people began to wear clothes (approximately 170,000 years ago).
"Ladybug" has a similar name in many countries. For example, in Israel it is “Moses’ cow.”
Home -> Encyclopedia ->Which insect (the only one of all) is able to turn its head and look “over its shoulder”?
The common praying mantis (lat. Mantis religiosa L.) is a representative of the suborder Mantises of the order Cockroaches, a large predatory insect with front legs well adapted for grasping food. Reaches 42-52 mm (male) or 48-75 mm (female) in length. The wings are well developed in both the male and the female, but in the latter (according to some scientists) they are used not for flight, but to intimidate prey. Based on specific observations made during scientific works, it has been established that the female also uses wings for flight. The abdomen is ovoid, rather long. A special feature of this type of mantis is its wide distribution: it lives throughout Southern Europe(south of the 52nd parallel), in the Front and Central Asia, Africa, partly Southeast Asia and Australia (where it competes with related species). In Crimea, it is gradually replaced by the tree mantis (Hierodula Tenuidentata). Introduced to the USA. |
The neck of DRAGONFLY is very flexible and thin. They can turn their heads 180 degrees!
It doesn’t cost them anything to see what’s going on behind them and whether there are any enemies nearby.
When flying, dragonflies make such turns that you'll be staring at them. But how come they don’t break their necks?
For a long time this remained a mystery to scientists.
German biologist Stanislav Gorb recently found out how these insects manage to avoid trouble on their necks.
It turns out that it's all about the tiny bristles that dot the dragonfly's head and its back.
In a moment of danger, the dragonfly throws back its head so that the bristles cling to each other and now their layer protects the neck from damage and blows - it softens them.
The most Interesting Facts about insects
The living creature with the largest brain in relation to its body is the ant.
The weight of insects that all the spiders on Earth eat in a year is greater than the combined weight of all people living on the planet.
Mosquitoes are attracted to the smell of people who have recently eaten bananas.
A dragonfly lives 24 hours.
Termites wear down wood twice as fast under heavy rock.
Scorpions can go without eating anything for almost two years, and ticks can go up to 10 years.
Butterflies taste food using their hind legs. And the color of their wings comes from tiny, overlapping scales that reflect light.
Ants never sleep. There are almost as many species of ants in the world (8,800) as there are species of birds (9,000).
Dragonflies are the fastest flying insects. Their speed reaches 57 km/h.
Aphids develop into adult insects from eggs in 6 days and live for another 4-5 days.
The blood of a grasshopper is white, the blood of a lobster is blue.
Insects are the first living creatures that appeared on Earth, more than 400 million years ago. Since then, they have survived five massive disasters and have proven to be more resilient than tyrannosaurs.
Every year, more people die from bee stings than from snake bites.
Insects annually devour 25-30% of the world's harvest.
In the eye of a dragonfly there are more than 20 thousand tiny lenses, forming, like pieces of a mosaic, a multifaceted (faceted) surface.
An analysis of the stomach contents of female mosquitoes caught around populated areas shows that 80% of these insects feed on the blood of domestic animals.
One bee colony produces up to 150 kg of honey per summer.
A bee has two stomachs - one for honey, the other for food.
Cross spiders eat their web every morning and then rebuild it again.
Over a lifetime, a bee produces 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey.
A female cockroach can lay more than two million eggs in a year. In addition, a cockroach can live for nine days without a head.
There are about 35 thousand. known species spiders and new ones are opening all the time.
Insects are food rich in protein, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals. They are considered a delicacy in Thailand, where fried crickets and locusts are popular.
The largest moth in the world is Attacus Altas. With a wingspan of 30 cm, it is often mistaken for a bird.
In Rus', grasshoppers were called dragonflies.
Every day, bees on our planet fertilize 3 trillion flowers and produce 3,000 tons of honey.
