Insects are integral companions of man in time and space, in sorrow and in joy, in health and death. The ancient Egyptians worshiped scarab beetles, and their modern descendants suffer from devastating locust invasions. Our ancestors tried unsuccessfully to escape from mosquitoes with tar, we sometimes complain about useless modern repellents. Cockroaches existed on Earth long before humans, and, according to scientists, will survive even a global nuclear war in which humanity will disappear.
Insects are infinitely diverse. Collectivist ants and extreme individualistic spiders belong to one class. A fragile elegant butterfly and a massive rhinoceros beetle capable of dragging objects dozens of times heavier than themselves - they are also relatives, albeit distant ones. Insects include flying mosquitoes, and parasites-parasites that do not move independently at all.
Finally, the most important dividing line runs along the useful-harmful line. No matter how hard amateur and professional entomologists try to convince everyone that all insects are needed, all insects are important, it is extremely difficult to do this with respect to especially distinguished representatives of this class. In order to escape and neutralize the harm from locusts, lice, bedbugs, mosquitoes and other insects, mankind had to pay with millions of lives and an unimaginable amount of resources. An increased yield from pollination by bees is only good if it is not destroyed by a locust infestation.
1. There are so many insects both in terms of quantity and species diversity that the data on the largest and smallest insects are constantly changing. To date, the largest representative of this class is considered to be the stick insect Phobaeticus chani, living on the island of Kalimantan in Indonesia. The length of its body is 35.7 cm. The smallest insect is the parasite (parasite that lives in other insects) Dicopomorpha echmepterygis. Its length is 0.139 mm.
2. It is known that during the years of industrialization, the Soviet Union massively purchased industrial equipment abroad. But I had to make other, at first glance, not the most necessary purchases. So, in 1931, a batch of ladybirds of the Rodolia species was purchased in Egypt. This was by no means an inappropriate expenditure of foreign currency - the ladybugs were supposed to save the Abkhaz citrus fruits. Cultivation of citrus fruits was not a century-old fishery in Abkhazia; tangerines and oranges were planted only in the 1920s. Not without misses - along with the seedlings purchased in Australia, they also brought the worst enemy of citrus fruits - the aphid called the Australian fluted worm. In Australia, thanks to ladybirds, its population was limited. In the USSR, without natural enemies, aphids became a real scourge. Rodolia was bred in a greenhouse in Leningrad and released into the gardens. The cows dealt with the worm so effectively that they themselves began to die of hunger - they did not know any other natural food in those places.
3. Bees are not only, and not even so much honey and combs. It has been known for a long time that due to pollination by bees the yield of almost all flowering agricultural crops increases. However, the increase received from the buzzing pollinators was usually estimated at tens of percent. Thus, the US Department of Agriculture in 1946 estimated the increase in yield in the garden with one hive per hectare at 40%. Similar figures were published by Soviet researchers. But when in 2011 a “clean” experiment was carried out in Uzbekistan, the numbers were completely different. Trees isolated from bees gave a yield 10 - 20 times less than pollinated by bees. The yield varied even on the branches of the same tree.
4. Dragonflies feed on mosquitoes, but the number of mosquitoes is usually so great that a person does not feel relief from the appearance of dragonflies. But in the Barabinskaya steppe (a swampy lowland in the Omsk and Novosibirsk regions), local residents go to field or garden work only when flocks of dragonflies appear, which effectively disperse mosquitoes.
5. The terrible enemy of the potato, the Colorado potato beetle, was discovered in 1824 in the American Rocky Mountains. It was a completely harmless creature that fed on wild-growing nightshades. With the development of agriculture, the Colorado potato beetle tasted potatoes. Since the late 1850s, it has been a disaster for American farmers. Within a decade and a half, the Colorado potato beetle entered Europe. In the USSR, he was first seen in 1949 in Transcarpathia. The massive invasion of the Soviet Union by the Colorado potato beetle occurred in the hot, dry summer of 1958. Myriads of beetles crossed borders not only by air, but also by sea - the Baltic coast in the Kaliningrad region and the Baltic States was strewn with beetles.
6. One small anthill of the genus Formica (these are ants most widespread in deciduous forests) per day destroys up to a million different forest pests. The forest, in which there are many such anthills, is protected by insect pests. If for some reason ants migrate or die - most often because of burning grass - the pests attack unprotected trees with astonishing speed.
7. Locusts are considered one of the most terrible insects since ancient times. This semblance of a grasshopper is not dangerous to humans in direct contact, but locust infestations have often led to mass starvation. Huge, billions of individuals, swarms of locusts are capable of devastating entire countries, eating everything in their path. Even large rivers do not stop them - the first rows of the swarm sink and create a ferry for others. Locust swarms stopped trains and shot down planes. The reasons for the appearance of such flocks were explained in 1915 by the Russian scientist Boris Uvarov. He suggested that when a certain threshold of numbers is exceeded, harmless filly living alone change the course of their development and behavior, turning into a large swarming locust. True, this guess did not help much in the fight against locusts. Effective means of locust control appeared only with the development of chemistry and aviation. However, even in the 21st century, it is far from always possible to stop, localize and destroy a swarm of locusts.
8. The Australians, trying to breed something useful on their continent, more than once stepped on a rake. The epic battle with bunnies is far from the only Australian battle against the forces of nature. At the beginning of the 19th century, a species of prickly pear cactus was brought to the smallest mainland. The plant liked the Australian climate. The Australians loved the cactus' growth rate and its strength - the perfect hedge. However, after several decades they had to think about it: cacti bred like rabbits in the past. Moreover, even if it was possible to uproot them, the land remained barren. We tried both bulldozers and herbicides - in vain. They defeated this type of prickly pear only with the help of an insect. The fire butterfly kaktoblastis was brought from South America. The eggs of this butterfly were planted on cacti, and in just 5 years the problem was solved. A monument was erected as a sign of gratitude to the fire.
9. Insects are eaten by almost all birds, and for about a third of bird species, insects are the only type of food. Among freshwater fish, 40% of the species feed only on insects and their larvae. Mammals have a whole squad of insectivores. It includes hedgehogs, moles and shrews. Approximately 1,500 insect species are used for food and people. Moreover, in different countries, the same insect can be considered both everyday food and an incredible delicacy. Locusts are considered the leader in cooking. Beetles, pupae and larvae of butterflies, bees, wasps, ants, grasshoppers and crickets are also popular.
10. Despite the abundance of artificial materials, several types of natural products obtained from insects have not yet found full-fledged artificial analogues. These are, first of all, silk (silkworm), honey and wax (bees) and shellac (high-quality insulating material obtained from some species of aphids).
11. Some insects are valuable as musicians. In ancient Greece and Rome, the rich kept many cicadas in their homes. Crickets are bred in China, Japan and other Asian countries. Singing field crickets are kept in cages in Italy.
12. Insects can be collectibles. Butterflies are most popular in this respect. The sizes of some of the collections are amazing. The Thomas Witt Entomological Museum is located in Munich. More than 10 million butterflies are kept in its funds. In the private collection of Baron Rothschild, subsequently donated to the British Museum, there were 2.25 million copies.
13. Like any collectible, butterflies come with a price. There are professional butterfly catchers, either following orders from collectors or working in free hunting mode. Some of them go in search of rare specimens even to Afghanistan, where the war has been going on for the last half century. The market for collectible butterflies is almost entirely in the shadows. Sometimes only completed transactions are reported, without mentioning the type of butterfly sold - almost all large butterflies are protected by environmental legislation. The highest price ever paid for a butterfly is $ 26,000. It is also known that the approach to the value of butterflies is similar to the approach to the value of collectible postage stamps - copies are valued that differ from their counterparts - with an asymmetrical pattern of wings, “wrong” colors, etc.
14. Termites can build huge dwellings. The height of the largest documented termite mound was 12.8 meters. In addition to the aboveground part, each termite mound also has underground floors. Some types of termites cannot do without water for a long time. Therefore, they dig deep holes to get to groundwater. Previously, termite mounds in the desert were considered to be a kind of indicators of the proximity of soil waters. However, it turned out that stubborn termites can go deep into the earth's thickness to a depth of 50 meters.
15. Up to the 21st century, malaria was the most terrible non-epidemic disease for humans. It was caused by the bites of female mosquitoes, in which parasitic unicellular organisms entered the human blood. Malaria was sick as early as the III millennium BC. e. Only at the end of the 19th century was it possible to establish the cause of the disease and the mechanism of its spread. Until now, it has not been possible to get a vaccine against malaria. The most effective way to combat malaria is to drain mosquito bogs. This was done in the USSR, USA and European countries. However, in countries located at the equator, governments do not have the funds for such a large-scale work, therefore, today over half a million deaths from malaria are recorded a year. The disease from which Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Christopher Columbus, Dante and Byron died, and now continues to mow people down by the thousands.
16. The Psilopa petroleum fly, or rather its larva, is a microscopic oil refinery. This fly lays its larvae exclusively in oil puddles. In the process of growth, the larva extracts food from oil, decomposing it into the necessary fractions.
17. "The butterfly effect" is a scientific term borrowed by scientists from science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. In his story “And Thunder Has Ranged,” he described a situation in which the death of one butterfly in the past led to catastrophic consequences in the future. In the scientific community, the term was popularized by Edward Lorenz. He built one of his lectures around the question of whether a butterfly flap in Brazil could trigger a tornado in the United States. In a broader sense, the term is used to show that even an extremely small effect on an unstable chaotic system can have arbitrarily large consequences for any part of this system or for it as a whole. In the mass consciousness, the word "may" dropped out of the definition, and the concept of the butterfly effect was transformed into "everything affects everything."
18. In 1956, the Brazilian scientist Warwick Kerr brought to his country from Africa several dozen African bee queens. South America has never had its own bees. They brought in European ones, but they did not tolerate the tropical climate. The decision to cross with them strong African bees was quite justified, but it was realized quite in the spirit of cheap American films about the fatal mistakes of scientists who wanted the best ... After crossing, we got strong, vicious, fast bees with good orientation in space. Moreover, either by mistake, or due to negligence, the new mutants were released. Brazilian beekeepers and farmers, accustomed to their sluggish bees, were shocked by the newcomers, who attacked the people they did not like with great speed, and the attacking swarm was much larger than the “local” bees. Dozens of people and hundreds of livestock were killed. The brainchild of Professor Kerr quickly drove out the local bees and began to avalanche northward, reaching the United States. Over time, they learned how to manage them, and Brazil became the world leader in the production of honey. And the dubious fame of the creator of killer bees stuck to Kerr.
19. Insects have been known to man since time immemorial, so it is not surprising that people have noticed the medicinal properties of some of them. The benefits of bee honey, venom and propolis are well known. Ant venom successfully treats arthritis. Australian aborigines brew one of the ant species in the form of tea, which they use to save themselves from migraines. Rotting wounds were healed by leaving fly larvae in them - they ate the affected tissue. The web was used as a sterile dressing.
20. Common plants can be pollinated by different, sometimes dozens of insect species. Melons and gourds pollinate 147 different insects, clover - 105, alfalfa - 47, apple - 32. But there are picky aristocrats in the plant kingdom. The Angrakum sequipedala orchid grows on the island of Madagascar. Its flower is so deep that only one single species of butterflies can reach the nectar - Macrosila morgani. In these butterflies, the proboscis reaches 35 cm in length.
