insects

7 Ways Animals Behave Badly

If you like to romanticize the natural world and its creatures, you're in for a few unpleasant surprises.

10 Intense Facts About the Giant Weta

The giant weta is one of the biggest insects on Earth, easily dwarfing most bugs and even some small rodents. Here are 10 facts you probably don't know about this New Zealand native.

Flowers are Pharmacies for Sick Bees

Female Butterflies Have A Second Stomach—Inside Their Vaginas

Scientists Aren't Releasing the Colombian Cocaine Moths Just Yet

7 Infested Facts About Bed Bugs

Scientists Turn Disease-Spreading Female Mosquitoes Male

A Rainbow of Butterflies

(Almost) Everything We Know About the Orchid Mantis is Wrong

Ants Make Little Toilets for their Nests

This Bug Only Warns You Not to Attack It After You Attack It

Bug’s Color is Warning for One Predator, Invisible to Another

16th Century Spanish Ships Took Tropical Fire Ants Around the World

Study Claims To Show Cockroaches Have Distinct Personalities

These Flies Go Headhunting for Dinner

Watch this Guy Serve as an Incubator for Bot Flies

Elsa Youngsteadt via North Carolina State University

NYC Insects Eat a Lot of Food Waste

How Antlion Larvae Eat Without a Mouth

Mosquitoes Get Bug Bites, Too

This Moth’s Love Song Has a Dual Meaning

When love is in the air for certain moth species, the female secretes a pheromone to signal that she’s ready to make little moths. An interested male will approach and “sing” her a courtship song composed of a series of ultrasonic pulses.

12 Facts About the Death's-Head Hawkmoth

Celebrate National Moth Week with a few facts about one of the most striking insects in the animal kingdom: The Death's-Head Hawkmoth.

A Tiny Spider’s Secret to Taking Down Big Prey

At first glance, the pin head-sized spider Zodarion cyrenaicum seems like its on a suicide mission every time it hunts for a meal. Its preferred prey is a desert ant, Messor arenarius, some three times bigger and six times heavier than itself. But as Davi

This Assassin Only Kills If Its Victim Strikes First

Letting your opponent land the first blow usually isn’t a surefire strategy for winning a fight, but for one insect predator, it’s the only way to come out on top.

A Treasure Trove of Parasitic Wasps

For the last three decades, scientists in the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG), a roughly one-thousand-square-kilometer chunk of forest in northwestern Costa Rica, have been inventorying and rearing hundreds of thousands of caterpillars. With the hel