Lounge
The Bug House’s Lounge is home to a colony of leaf cutter ants, which can be seen crossing a rope bridge high above the gallery. More than 5,000 ants live in the colony. This may seem like a lot, but it’s only a fraction of the size that colonies can grow to in the wild. Have a look at some fascinating facts about the huge number of arthropods all around us – the numbers are frightening!
- There are thought to be 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects alive in the world today – 1.5 billion for every person.
- To date more than one million species of insects have been discovered. There are more than 62,000 species of spiders and mites, 13,000 species of centipedes and millipedes, 40,000 species of crustaceans, including at least 1,200 species of woodlice (the land-living crustaceans). Scientists estimate that a further 7 million insect species await discovery.
- There are nearly 23,000 insect species recorded from Britain alone.
- A supercolony of the ant Formica yessensis in Japan is thought to have 360 million workers, 1,080,000 queens and 45,000 interconnected nests.
- Half of all invertebrate species live in tropical rain forests, less than 7% of the world’s surface.
- The Australian ghost moth Trictena atripalpas can lay as many as 44,000 eggs.
Swarm of gnats
- Army ant queens may lay 2 million eggs in a month.
- The commonest indoor cockroach in Europe is the German cockroach, Blatella germanica. Despite its name it actually originates from southern Asia.
- The green peach aphid Myzus persicae has been found to be resistant to 71 different chemical insecticides.
- A desert locust can eat its own body weight of vegetation every day. In one day a swarm of 50 million desert locusts can devour crops that would have been a day’s food for 182,500 people – and 50 million locusts is considered a small swarm!
- In the first 56 days of its life the caterpillar of the North American Polyphemus moth eats 86,000 times its birth weight in birch, maple and oak leaves.
- The queen honeybee may live for 4 or 5 years.
Queen with worker ants
- The American cockroach Periplaneta america is the fastest running insect in the world. It can run 50 times its body length a second, reaching a top speed of nearly 5.5km (3.4 miles) per hour.
- More than a million people die every year from malaria, which is spread by the blood feeding habits of Anopheline mosquitoes.
- Another deadly insect is the oriental rat flea Xenopsylla cheopsis, which was the carrier of the bubonic plague bacterium. In the 14th century bubonic plague caused the death of a quarter of the European population, some 25 million people.
- About one third of the crops produced in the world each year, worth more than £230 billion, is lost into the mouths of insects.
- The Colorado beetle Leptinotarsa decemlineata is regularly seen on ‘wanted’ posters in American police stations because of the damage it causes to potato plants.
Cockroach
- Leaf cutter ants can carry loads weighing up to twelve times their own weight – the equivalent of a 200 pound adult carrying a 2,400 pound lorry in the air. They carry these huge loads for up to 100 metres back to the nest site.
- The eyelash mite Demodex folliculorum lives on humans and is only 0.35mm long. It lives at the base of eyelash follicles, feeding on skin secretions and cleaning up the area around the eye. Its total lifespan is just two weeks and it can walk at 37.5cm per hour.
- Beetles are still a big hit in Liverpool! There are over 3,333 invertibrate species, including 800 species of beetle in and around the Sefton coastal dune system just north of the city, making this one of the richest areas in the country for these remarkable animals.
- In 1981 the fen raft spider became one of the 23 species of arthropod protected in Britain by the Wildlife and Countryside Act. It is illegal to harm these creatures, so think twice before stepping on a spider!
Worker ant carrying a leaf
All Illustrations by Steve Roberts
