Amazing Facts About Arthropods

There are 1.1 million species of arthropods. Let's explore the world of insects and discover and learn some amazing facts.

1.      Aphids are born pregnant without the benefit of sex. Aphids can give birth 10 days after being born themselves.

2.      No two human beings have the same fingerprint; likewise, no two spider webs are the same.

3.      Man can survive for 40 days without food but not without water but an adult bedbug can survive up to one year without feeding.

4.      Asian hornet's sting has a higher concentration of the pain-causing chemical called Acetylcholine than any other stinging insect and an enzyme in its venom can dissolve human tissue.

5.      A typical bed usually houses over 6 billion dust mites. That's why the bed is said to be the dirtiest part of the house.

6.      Ants don't sleep and they are social insects that live in colonies which may have as many as 500,000 individuals.

7.      When ants find food, they lay down a chemical trail, called a pheromone, so that other ants can find their way from the nest to the food source. Worker ants may live seven years and the queen may live as long as 15 years.

8.      Australian termites have been known to build mounds twenty feet high and at least 100 feet wide.

9.      Dragonflies can fly forward, sideward and backward and they are one of the fastest flying insects with an average of 50 to 60 mph.

10.  Each year, insects eat 1/3 of the Earth's food crop.

11.  Mosquitoes dislike citronella because it irritates their feet. You're more likely to be a target for mosquitoes if you consume bananas.

12.  Mosquitoes prefer children to adults, blondes to brunettes and their favorite color is blue. And, there are more than 2,500 varieties of mosquito. And they are responsible for the most human deaths world-wide.

13.  The blood of mammals is red, the blood of lobsters is blue and the blood of insects is yellow.

14.  The buzz that you hear when a bee approaches is the sound of its four wings moving at 11,400 strokes per minute. Bees fly an average of 15 miles per hour.

15.  The largest cockroach on record is one measured at 3.81 inches in length.

16.  The largest insect egg belongs to the Malaysian jungle nymph, a sticklike insect, and measures about 1.3 centimeters long - larger than a peanut! (Some insects, mainly mantises and cockroaches, lay egg cases that are larger, but they contain about 200 individual eggs.)

17.  The leap of an average flea is equivalent to a 100 pound man leaping 1,000 and enduring a g-force of 20,000 pounds with acceleration greater than that of a space shuttle.

18.  The tsetse flies kill 66,000 people annually.

19.  The venom of a female black widow spider is more potent than that of a rattlesnake.

20.  The world's smallest winged insect is the Tanzanian parasitic wasp. It is smaller than the eye of a housefly.

21.  There are more insects in one square mile of rural land than there are human beings on the entire earth.

22.  In its entire lifetime, the average worker bee produces 1/12th teaspoon of honey. The honeybee kills more people world-wide than all the poisonous snakes combined.

23.  When a queen bee lays the fertilized eggs that will develop into new queens, only one of the newly laid queens actually survives. The first new queen that emerges from her cell destroys all other queens in their cells and, thereafter, reigns alone.

24.  There are more than 900,000 known species of insects in the world.

25.  The ten deadliest insects in the world are the mosquitoes, fleas, bees, tsetse flies, fire ants, locusts, wasps, Siafu (African ants), Asian hornets and kissing bugs

Hope you enjoyed this. Thank you!

For related articles see:

Animal World: Facts and Peculiar Things

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Interesting and Random Facts About Animals