Amazing facts about Insects

1. For every person on the earth, there are two hundred million insects. More insects can be found in only ten square feet of rainforest than there are people in Manhattan. One square mile of rural land can hold more insects than there are human beings on Earth.

2. Over 900,000 known species of insects exist throughout the world.

3. Each year, insects eat about a third of the world's food crops.

4. In contrast, each year the average person will "eat" several insects while they are sleeping. During the average lifetime, a person consumes about seventy insects and ten spiders during their sleep. According to some sources, beetles have a taste that is similar to apples while wasps taste like pine nuts.

5. The Department of Health and Human Services has set standards regarding how many insect parts are food can contain, called the Food Defect Action Levels. Chocolate can have up to eight insect fragments per hundred grams, while peanut butter can have only sixty fragments. Meanwhile, wheat flour can have 150 fragments per hundred grams and paprika can have 300 fragments.

6. The smallest insect in the world, the Tanzanian parasitic wasp, is smaller than the eye on a housefly. The largest insect is the goliath beetle, which can grow up to four and half inches long.

7. Slavery is not strictly a human condition. Amazon ants will steal larvae of other ants to be their slaves. They depend upon these slaves for their survival because Amazon ants are incapable of doing anything other than fight.

8. An ant is capable of lifting fifty times its own weight and is capable pulling thirty times its own weight.

9. The most dangerous ant in the world is the black bulldog ant. It lives in Australia and has killed several human beings. When provoked, it stings and bites at the same time.

10. There are about a million ants per person. Ants are very social animals and will live in colonies that can contain almost 500,000 ants.

11. A flea can jump about two hundred times the length of their body, which is about thirteen inches. This is the equivalent to a six foot tall human jumping nine hundred feet.

12. A cockroach can live nine days without eating. This is also the same amount of time that the body of a cockroach can live after its head has been cut off before it eventually dies from starvation.

13. Mosquitoes have forty-seven teeth. They do not use these to bite, however. Instead, they have a proboscis, which is a tubular appendage.

14. Mosquitoes are more likely to bite children than adults, blonde-haired people rather than brown-haired people, and people wearing dark clothing. They are also attracted to people who just ate bananas or finished exercising. This is because foods high in potassium and exercising cause your body to release lactic acid, which is attractive to mosquitoes.

15. Citronella does not repel mosquitoes through its smell. Mosquitoes dislike citronella because it irritates its feet.

16. Mosquitoes are responsible causing the most human deaths worldwide than any other animal-almost two million annually. They do this by transmitting diseases such as the West Nile virus, malaria, and Dengue fever. Second to this is the tsetse fly, which kills about 66,000 people annually.

17. Dragonflies are capable of flying sixty miles per hour, making them one of the fastest insects. This is good since they are in a big hurry, as they only live about twenty-four hours.

18. Flies jump backwards during takeoff.

19. A housefly will regurgitate its food and eat it again.

20. Termites outweigh humans by almost ten to one.

21. Termites have been known to eat food twice as fast when heavy metal music is playing.

22. There are more beetles than any other animal. In fact, one out of every four animals is a beetle.

23. The rhinoceros beetle is the strongest animal and is capable of lifting 850 times its own weight.

24. A spider's web is not a home, but rather a trap for its food. They are as individual as snowflakes, with no two ever being the same. Some tropical spiders have built webs over eighteen feet across.

25. More people are afraid of spiders than death. Amazingly, few people are afraid of Champagne corks even though you are more likely to be killed by one than by a spider.

26. The most poisonous spider is the black widow. Its venom is more potent than a rattlesnake's.

27. During its lifetime, a worker bee will only produce about one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey.

28. Honeybees are more dangerous than snakes. Bees kill more people each year than all the poisonous snakes combined.

29. Butterflies have taste sensors in their feet and taste their food by standing on it. Although all species of butterflies have six legs, some keep their front legs tucked up under their body most of the time.

30. The butterfly was originally called the "flutterby."

31. The praying mantis is capable of turning its head 360 degrees. It is the only insect that can do this. It is also the only animal on Earth with only one ear.

32. Crickets and katydids have ears on their legs.

33. Aphids are born pregnant and can give birth when they are only ten days old.

34. Only male crickets can chirp and will chirp faster in warm weather than cool. In fact, you can determine the temperature by counting the number of chirps in fifteen seconds and adding it to 37.

35. The average bed contains between two million to six million dust mites.