#19 Caring for Mother Nature: Buggy Insects

Greetings, readers. Today we learn about (eeeeeek) insects as we continue our series, Caring for Mother Nature, by my friend, author and naturalist, Peggy Sias Lantz (click her name to visit her website).

Insects are not just “bugs!”

by Peggy Lantz

Insects outnumber humans. Entomologists (who study insects) say there are about a billion and a half insects for every person on earth! And it’s a good thing. I don’t care how you feel about insects, but without them, life on earth could not exist. Not birds, not snakes, not fish, not flowers, not trees, not even bunnies and humans—not anything.

I might even stick my neck out and say that if we could eradicate all of just the mosquitoes on Earth, hundreds of species would become extinct in a few days.

Insects are invertebrates, meaning they have no backbone. [Charlene says she knows some people like that.] They wear their skeleton, called an exoskeleton, on the outside to protect the soft parts of their bodies. The shell is made of chitin – the same kind of material that your fingernails are made of.

Three-part creatures

Their bodies are usually divided into three parts, made up of the head, which has the mouth parts and a pair of antennae; the thorax, to which three legs are attached on each side; and the abdomen, which contains the body fluids and the reproductive and egg-laying parts. They have jointed legs, and most adult insects have wings.

The life cycle of an insect is astonishing. You probably learned it in kindergarten. It’s called metamorphosis. The egg and larva (worm; caterpillar) part of the cycle is pretty common, even the part about the larva shedding its skin several times as it grows (like snakes), but the next part is hard to believe. The caterpillar forms a case (cocoon or chrysalis) around itself, and inside that case it turns into something else quite miraculous. The worm becomes a mushy liquid and remakes itself into something that both looks and behaves totally different. Inside that chrysalis the caterpillar often turns into a beautiful butterfly. Inside a cocoon the worm turns into a moth, also often very beautiful. From a crawling worm that eats plants, it becomes a fragile flying creature that sucks nectar from flowers, all the while collecting pollen from the flower to share with the next flower it visits, so that the flower will make a new plant with the same beautiful flower.

Moths and butterflies

Most butterflies visit flowers that are open during the day, and most moths visit flowers that open during the night. Did you ever watch the night-blooming cereus cactus slowly open its huge white blossoms on a moonlit night? I’ve had neighbors that held parties just to see the blooms open. I have sat hoping to see the one single species of moth that will pollinate that one species of plant (I haven’t yet). Insects are often very particular.

Many insects become adults after hatching from their eggs in what is called incomplete metamorphosis. Right out of the egg, they look very much like the adult form, only small, like cockroaches and grasshoppers. It’s called a nymph. As it grows, it has to shed its exoskeleton by splitting the hard cover open. It crawls out and its skin hardens into a new exoskeleton. It may do this a half dozen or more times, growing a little larger each time, before it grows its wings in its final adult stage.

This information is from my book, The Young Naturalist’s Guide to Florida:

“Insects live everywhere. They are found in coldest Antarctica, in the driest deserts, in rivers, on top of the highest mountains, and on the surface of the ocean far from land. They can live in hot springs, in salt water, in crude oil, even in the tightest vacuum that humans can make with almost no air at all.

“The smallest insect can be seen only with a microscope. The largest ones are as big as a mouse. The Atlas Moth in India has wings that spread 36 cm (12 inches) from tip to tip. [Pictured here.]

“How much they can eat is astonishing. The caterpillar of the Polyphemus Moth, for example, eats food that amounts to 86,000 times its birth weight in the first two days of its life. Insects of one kind or another eat nearly everything: wood, leaves, clothes, books, other insects, and animals, dead or alive.”

It’s okay if we like some insects better than we like other insects, but don’t wish them all away. Each one has its own little niche in God’s plan. God didn’t make no junk!

—END—

Thanks for reading!

Your writer on the wing,

Charlene

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