Insect
Six-legged arthropods with three segmented body regions, compound eyes, and protective chitin exoskeletons.
Giant Prickly Stick Insect
A leaf-mimic that sways like a branch in the breeze, and hatches looking like an ant.
Giant Water Bug
A big water bug that stabs fish and tadpoles with its beak, and is drawn to lights.
Green Drake Mayfly
A burrowing mayfly that finds rivers by their polarized glint, and lands on smooth black plastic too.
Hercules Beetle
A rainforest giant up to seven inches long that fights with pliers for horns, carves bark with gear-locked jaws, and turns from khaki-green to black as the air gets humid.
Housefly
A fly that tastes with its feet, sips only liquids and is a mechanical vector of more than 100 diseases.
Human Botfly
A bumblebee lookalike that glues its eggs to a blood-feeding carrier, usually a mosquito or a tick, which delivers them when it feeds.
Hummingbird Hawk-Moth
A day-flying moth that hangs in front of flowers while a special patch of its eye fixes on the flower's entrance.
Luna Moth
A big green silk moth whose spinning hindwing tails pull bat attacks off its body, and whose adults do not eat.
Monarch Butterfly
A butterfly of about half a gram that wears milkweed poison as armor, and whose eastern migrants steer by the sun.
Mound-Building Termite
A fungus-farming termite whose queens and kings can live as long as 20 years in the lab, while its workers live only a few months.
Orchid Mantis
Flower-colored to a bee's eyes, it draws in wild pollinators at a higher rate than real flowers do, then catches them.
Periodical Cicada
17 years underground, then a few remarkably loud weeks
Red Imported Fire Ant
An ant a few millimetres long that links up with its nestmates into a raft that can float for days.
Sacred Scarab
A very large dung roller that shapes droppings into balls and holds heat in its thorax in flight.
Seven-Spot Ladybird
The red beetle that bleeds poison from its leg joints.
Silkworm
A caterpillar that grows thousands of times heavier in a month, then wraps itself in one silk thread up to 1,800 metres long.
Silverfish
A wingless, silver-scaled insect that keeps molting as an adult and can go up to a year without food.
Spotted Lanternfly
A planthopper, not a moth, that turns red as it stocks up on its host tree's chemical defences.
Stag Beetle
Antler-like jaws for wrestling rivals, years spent as a larva tunnelling through rotting wood, and just a few weeks as an adult to find a mate.
Tsetse Fly
A blood-drinking fly that makes milk and gives birth to a larva nearly as big as she is.
Western Honeybee
A forager who dances flower coordinates with her whole body, and dies giving her sting.
Yellow Fever Mosquito
A mosquito about a quarter of an inch long whose yellow fever cost U.S. troops more casualties than enemy fire in the Spanish-American War.