Among all the creatures on earth, the tiny insects have never found our attention. Like other creatures, they too exhibit some behavior that governs their living. They many times have a strange and mysterious behavior as compared to that of other animals. Not many really like observing the tiny insects.
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Insect Behaviors
Revealing here, a few mysterious and strange insect behaviors. I am sure you did not know this.
10. Social behavior in bees
Honey bees are social creatures and live within colonies with a queen, thousands of workers and a few male drones. Honey bees behave defensively when intruders are near, guarding the entrance to their nests. However, honey bees are able to sting only once. Because stingers contain barbs and are attached to the worker’s intestines, they detach from the stinging bee’s body after attacking a victim. While honey bees look for food in groups, a colony can survive without hunting for food for several years by living on food reserves.
9. Spiders Tune Their Webs like A Guitar
When a spider weaves its web, the web strings provide a lot of information from the array of vibrations coming from the web. The spider “reads” these vibrations to, for example, locate where a struggling insect has been snagged. The structure of the web also has apparently been tuned to produce the right triangulation.
And sometimes the spider will even “play” the web to create vibrations and interpret the results. The spider can actually pluck or bounce the silk strings and it can monitor the echoes that come back so it can locate objects. It can also distinguish whether the suspect is its food or its mate just by the tunes that the web produces.
8. Ghost Ants change color
Unlike other ants, these strange creatures have translucent abdomens. The semi-transparent abdomens change color to match the food they are eating. They usually feed on sweets. The sugar water drops mixed with paraffin base to keep their structure in different colors give a beautiful appearance to these ghost ants. The ants gain the colors as they sip the liquid.
7. The synchronous fireflies
If you have seen those then thousand tiny glowing creatures by a riverbank at night, you have witnessed the most beautiful painting in the world. The mystery lies in not what makes these creatures glow, but what makes it so synchronous among such a huge number of creatures at a time.
This is a localized communication, which is distributed in a swarm like ripples in a pond. If you watch the phenomenon from the beginning, it begins with a few fireflies have found the right rhythm. From these troop leaders, a small collective rhythm is transmitted to the rest of the population, as long as they are not in sync. Now you see a programmed glow, of what once appeared as chaos.
6. Female praying mantis eats male after mating
A praying mantis is the one that has its forelegs folded as though it is praying. But its mating ritual is not at all divine! The female praying mantis eats the male head alive after mating. Yes, cruel as we may think it is. But many times the male mantises offer themselves up as food to the female mantises after the making process. This biologically makes sense. There is no other high energy source around the female mantis and it should not die due to lack of food while laying eggs. So, in order to bring the next generation to life, the father (male mantis) will sacrifice his life. Another strange fact is that these fathers can still live for hours without ahead. Many times they also try to run away heedlessly. (pun intended).
5. Ants Create living floats to protect their Queen from floods
We know ants live together in a large number. And there is always a queen ant. This particular behavior has been observed in the Amazon jungles. They build live floats for the queen ant. They form massive clumps on the top of large puddles and flooded areas. Ants work together to protect the queen by strategically placing larvae, pupae, and worker ants at the bottom of the raft. Larvae are at the bottom of the pile as they are the youngest. Now workers grab the nearest larvae and throw them under the heap, they then link jaws to limbs and move around to give the raft its structure. The queen is placed in a position of honor at the very center of the raft. Such a prestige!
4. The flower? The insect…The cannibal!!
The Orchid Mantis is a variety of flower mantis usually found in Malaysia and Indonesia. Doesn’t the mantis pictured look just like an orchid? They hide in the flowers they resemble, waiting for other delicious insects to alight. See a beautiful picture of a pink flower mantis here. It’s actually an insect in disguise.
3. Caterpillars dance
I am pretty sure, this behavior in caterpillars have taught humans how difficult it can be to appear so smooth on the floor. Hence the caterpillar dance step in breakdance.
2. Stick insects can shed and regenerate their limbs to escape attacks by predators
When a bird grabs hold of a stick insect’s leg, it can still make an easy escape. The stick insect simply gives up the leg, using a special muscle to break it off at a weak joint. Juvenile stick insects will regenerate the missing limb the next time they molt. In some cases, adult stick insects can even force themselves to molt again to regain a lost leg.
1. Blister beetles that can harm you for defense
Blister beetle is one of the clever insects as well as harmful to other creatures that try to bother him. As its name suggests, they have chemical weapons containing poison cantharidin. The toxin was able to make his skin blistered and very painful for humans to cause swelling. But despite the dangerous, toxic blister beetles are very beneficial to humans. Blister beetle toxin is used in the medical world as a remedy.