Totally Awesome Insect Facts!

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How many continents do butterflies live on? Which surprising animals are a rolly polly’s closest relatives? How do spiders avoid sticking to their own webs? What’s a cockroach’s favorite food? – Check out these amazing facts about bugs for all kinds of awesome info about insects, arachnids, and more!


Insect Insights

• An insect heart isn’t like ours. It’s shaped like a long tube!
• Some bugs have compound eyes made up of tens of thousands of individual lens-like parts.
• Certain kinds of insects are capable of counting!
  

Backyard Bugs

• Being able to glow helps fireflies to communicate.
• Millipedes have more legs than centipedes, but they actually move slower!
• Rolly pollies are not actually insects – they’re crustaceans. That means they’re more closely related to shrimp and lobsters than to beetles!

Gross Crawling Critters

• Certain dung beetles roll the wastes of other animals into balls before using them as anything from food, to home, to a place to lay their eggs!
• One of a roach's favorite foods is glue.
• Because they can’t chew, houseflies only eat liquids. That’s why they "spit" on anything they want to eat: the spit-like substance turns the solid into a liquid so they can drink it up!

Bees and Butterflies

• While collecting nectar, a bee sometimes visits more than a thousand flowers in just one trip.
• Boy honeybees don’t have stingers. Only the girls do!
• Butterflies live on every continent except for Antarctica.
• Many types of butterflies taste with their feet!

Arachnids

• There are lots of special ways human sometimes use spider silk: Because it’s so strong, fisherman have been known to use certain spiderwebs to help them catch small fish. Spider silk was also once used to cover wounds in some parts of the world!
• If there isn’t much food to eat, scorpions can slow down their bodies so they’re able to survive off as little as one bug each year.
• Not every strand of a spider’s web is sticky. When a spider builds its web, it remembers which strands are sticky and which are not so it can walk across and not get stuck!

Ants and Termites

• An ant can lift up to 20 times the weight of its own body! That’s like the equivalent of a person picking up one or two horses!!
• Though ants might not speak like humans do, they actually have a very detailed “language” that communicates through movement, touch, and even smell.
• Some cultures are known to eat termites! In certain places, a Queen termite is even considered to be a delicacy!