List of most important questions with answers on Three Creepy Crawlies

Can Spiders Change Color?

The crab spiders, such as Misumena, live in flowers. They lie in wait for insects, sitting on flowers whose colors they match. They are even capable of changing color over a few days to match the flower. Most kinds of spider stay the same color, but their natural coloring or pattern is often perfect camouflage for their habitat.

Which Are The Biggest Spiders?

The “bird-eating” spiders of South America are both the heaviest and widest species, with weights up to 3 02 and leg spans up to 10 inches. Very few of them actually eat birds, but the bigger species do eat small frogs, lizards, and snakes.

How Many Kinds Of Spider Are There?

There are over 30,000 species discovered so far, but there could be as many again that haven’t yet been found. Spiders can live virtually all over the world on land.

Do All Spiders Have Webs?

Not all spiders make a nice round web. Some weave hammock-shaped webs, flat sheets of silk or simply trip wires radiating from their lair to trap insects. Some hunt without using a web, but all spiders can make silk.

Are Spiders Good Parents?

Most spiders don’t really look after their young. Many lay their eggs in a cocoon for protection, but often the female will die before they hatch. Mother wolf spiders carry the cocoon attached to their spinnerets (the organ that makes their silk), and Pisaura carries her cocoon in her fangs until hatching time, when she builds a silk tent on a plant for the babies to live in. The tiny Theridion sisyphium lives in a thimble-shaped tent above its hammock web. In the tent it looks after the egg cocoon, then feeds the tiny babies below it with the regurgitated juices from the prey.

Which Spiders Give Presents?

Male spiders are often smaller than their mates. Sometimes the female may attack the male in order to eat him. Many American wolf spiders “sing” to the female to distract her and try and save themselves. The male spider Pisaura mlrabllls of Europe makes himself safe by catching a fly, wrapping it into a silk parcel, and presenting it to the female, who eats it as they mate. He does this in the hope that she won’t be hungry enough to make a meal of him.

Which Spiders Are Human Killers?

All spiders are poisonous, but only a few have strong enough fangs and venom to harm people. The black widow, found in many warm parts of the world is a small, round spider which likes hiding in quiet places. It is not aggressive, but if it is attacked, it may bite. After a few minutes, the bite is terribly painful. The victim feels dizzy and can suffer from paralysis. It is rarely fatal, though, and nowadays cures are available. The Australian Sydney funnel- web spider is a larger species with a bite that causes heart failure and breathing problems. The recluse spiders of the USA and the Brazilian wandering spider also have bites that can be fatal. However, the chances of being killed by a spider are less than those of being struck by lightning.

Which Spider Makes The Biggest Webs?

The tropical orb web spiders can have webs over 16 feet across. Up to 2,300 feet length of silk strand can be produced by the silk glands of one of these spiders. The silk is so strong it can actually hold a human.

What Is A Spiders Web Made Of?

A spider’s web is made of silk. Spiders have glands on their abdomen which produce the silk, which can be made sticky, elastic, or very strong. Some spider silk is much stronger than steel of the same thickness.

How Many Eyes Does A Spider Have?

Most spiders have eight eyes, but there are species with six, four, or two. The shape and arrangement of the eyes help to tell the family a spider belongs to. Many spiders use touch more than sight, but the eyes of jumping spiders are well developed.

Which Creepy-Crawly Lives Under A Trapdoor?

Trapdoor spiders dig a burrow in the forest floor and cover it with an earth trapdoor. The spider lurks in its burrow, the door half-open, until something tasty to eat walks by. Then it pounces, drags the prey underground, and slams the trapdoor shut.

Can Spiders Fly?

Spiders do not have wings, but many species can parachute or sail through the air by letting out a long thread of silk until they are carried away by the wind. Many young spiders leave the nest by this “ballooning” technique. They can be carried thousands of feet above the earth.

Do All Scorpions Sting?

All scorpions have poisonous stings at the ends of their tails. They use them mainly to defend themselves. Only a few are truly dangerous to humans. Most scorpion stings are unpleasant rather than deadly.

When Do Scorpions Dance?

The mating ritual of scorpions looks like a dance. The partners grab one another’s pincers, to protect themselves from each other. With pincers held, they move back, forward, and sideways, sometimes for hours. Finally, the male deposits a packet of sperm and moves the female over the top of it. The sperm goes into her body and fertilizes the eggs.

Where Do Baby Scorpions Hitch A Ride?

After hatching, the young of many scorpions climb onto their mother’s back. They use her large pincers as a climbing ramp. They ride there until after their first moult (when they lose a layer of skin). After this they leave their mother and start to fend for themselves.

Where Do The Biggest Scorpions Live?

The largest scorpions live in tropical forests. Some, such as the imperial scorpion of Africa, are up to 7 in long. These scorpions aren’t very poisonous.

What Tick Carries A Mountainous Disease?

A serious illness, called Rocky Mountain fever, is caused by a tiny organism called a rickettsia. It invades the cells of the body and produces severe fever. The disease is carried by woodchucks, but wood ticks, living on these animals, can carry it to humans. The disease was first discovered in Montana about 100 years ago, when it killed three-quarters of those who got it. Since then, it has been found in other parts of North and South America, but not in such a deadly form.

How Can You Tell A Millipede From A Centipede?

Most millipedes are slow-moving plant- eaters with short legs and chewing mouthparts. Centipedes are fast-moving meat-eaters with fangs that they use to kill prey. They have fewer legs than millipedes.

How Big Are The Biggest Millipedes?

Some of the millipedes that live in the tropical parts of Africa grow to 11 inches or more, with a diameter (thickness) of about 1 inch.

Why Do Ticks Drink Blood?

Ticks don’t find food very often, and they must be ready to latch on to anything that can provide it as it passes. An adult tick may have to wait months or even years before fastening its jaws into a passing mammal and sucking its blood. It has to have a meal of blood before it can lay its eggs.

How Many Legs Does A Millipede Really Have?

In spite of their name (mille is Latin for a thousand), millipedes never have a thousand legs. The most that they have is 200 pairs (400 legs), and some species have only 20 pairs (40 legs). The leg movements are co-ordinate in “waves” running from front to back.

Will You Ever Be Attacked By A Centipede?

Centipedes have a pair of poison fangs that they use to catch their prey. Most centipedes in countries with a mild climate do not have a powerful enough bite to do serious damage. Anyway, they usually run away rather than attack. But some large tropical centipedes can inflict a nasty bite if threatened.

What Insect Is Making A Meal Of Your Skin?

A large part of house dust is made up of tiny flakes of human skin and this is what the house dust mite eats. It likes warm, damp conditions, such as in beds and mattresses, which can also provide plenty of skin. Although most people are not affected by these mites, some people are highly allergic to them.

What Is The Biggest Earthworm?

The biggest earthworm ever measured was 22 feet long when moving (that’s twice the length of a tiger). Most earthworms are under 12 inches long, but the South African worm Microcbaetus grows to over 3 feet 3 inches. Giant earthworms measure 10 feet. They live in Australia and in Oregon and Washington, USA.

WHERE DO Killer WORMS LIVE?

When humans transport insects to different countries, the effects can be terrible on the species already living in that country. A New Zealand flatworm, called Artioposthia, caused havoc when it arrived in the British Isles. It grows to up to 8 inches long, and hunts for earthworms in the top 12 inches of soil. It has greatly reduced earthworm numbers in places where it has spread. In Northern Ireland, some pastures have been totally cleared of earthworms by the invader.

How Long Does An Earthworm Live?

So many earthworms are eaten by birds and animals, from moles to foxes, that the average lifespan of an earthworm is probably very short. However, some have been known to live 10 years.

How Many Worms Are There In A Bucket Of Soil?

In soil from a fertile meadow, there may be as many as 60 earthworms under each square foot. An average bucket of such soil might contain up to 200. Earthworms play a huge part in turning soil over. This puts air back into it and returns the goodness to it.

Which Worms Can You Catch From A Dog?

Dogs often have parasitic worms inside them. These can include a tiny tapeworm called Echinococcus. The larva forms a cyst the size of an orange inside the host animal. The worm’s eggs are passed out in dog feces. A dog that has licked itself clean may have eggs on its tongue. If it licks the face or hand of a human, they may be infected. A huge cyst can form in their body, or most deadly of all, in the brain.

How Long Is A Tapeworm?

Many kinds of tapeworm infect the gut of animals. In man, the pork tapeworm can grow to 5 feet, but a tapeworm caught from the fish Diphyllobothrium can be over 59 feet long.

Which Worm Lives Inside People?

The human blood fluke is the “flatworm” that causes the disease bilharzia, which attacks millions of people in the Middle East and Africa. The larvae of the worms are released into the water, and burrow into the skin of humans who are wading through the water. Pairs of flukes then live in veins in the gut. Their eggs are passed out through the person’s bladder, damaging it as they go.

Which Worm Sucks Blood?

The medicinal leech sucks blood from mammals, including humans. In the past, people treated many diseases by “bleeding” the patient. They believed that diseases were caused by too much blood in the body. The leech would use its three teeth to open a wound; its digestive juices anaesthetized wounds and kept blood flowing.

Where Do Slugs Hang Out In Dry Weather?

We always see slugs in wet weather, but where do they go when it dries up? Unlike a snail, a slug cannot hide out in its shell during drought. Many slugs simply burrow deep into the earth and stay there until it is wet again.

Do Slugs And Snails Have Teeth?

Not really. Snails and slugs have no jaws like ours, but they have special ribbon- shaped tongues which are covered in row upon row of horny “teeth.” They rasp away at their food and break it into tiny pieces. On a quiet night in the garden, you can hear the noise of snail and slug tongues shredding their food with their file-like tongues.

Do All Slugs Eat Plants?

Most slugs are plant-eaters. Some are pests because they attack our crops, but many prefer to feed on dead or decaying plant matter. Shelled slugs, such as Testacella, are unusual because they have a tiny bit of shell left on their backs. They are unusual in another way too; they are meat-eaters. They go underground and chase worms. They harpoon them with their tongues, then suck them into their mouths.

Which Is The World’s Fastest Snail?

Most snails are so slow-moving that nobody has bothered to measure their speed, but the fastest snail on record was an ordinary garden snail Helix aspersa. This could move at 0.03 mph.

How Do Snails Breathe?

Slugs and snails have turned the wall of the mantle (the skin of the snail) into a kind of lung. It is well supplied with blood vessels and encloses a cavity that is full of air. This connects to the outside air through a special hole that can be opened and closed. You can often see this hole on the right of the body if you look at a slug or snail when it’s stretched out.

Which Slugs Mate In Mid-Air?

Most slugs and snails are both male and female in the same body. Even so, they usually mate with another slug or snail, and mating rituals may be very complicated. For example, one great gray slug meets another on the ground and starts a slimy embrace. The pair climbs up vegetation, entwining and producing so much slime that it forms a rope up to 39 inches long. The pair dangles from the end of this as they complete their mating in mid-air.

How Do Snails Move Without Legs?

Snails move on a single thick pad of muscle known as the “foot.” Waves of muscle power move down the underside of the foot, lifting sections and moving them forward, as others are put down. From above the snail appears to glide along. The mucus, or slime, that the snail produces, helps smooth its path, and is sticky enough to help it grip when it climbs.

Do All Snail Shells Coil The Same Way?

In most snails, the shells spiral to the right. If you hold the shell so the mouth is facing you, the mouth is on the right. Some species have a left-handed shell. In each species, all the individuals coil in the same direction.

What Do Snail Eggs Look Like?

Some species produce clutches of up to 100, others fewer. In many cases, they are round and transparent, but other species such as the giant African snail have eggs with a hard chalky shell. The eggs are the size of a small bird’s egg.

How Big Is The Biggest Snail?

The shell of the giant African snail Achatina can be up to 13 inches long. That is as long as a rabbit. The extended snail is longer. A captive specimen was once measured at 15 inches from head to tail, with a shell 10 inches long, and a weight of 32 oz.

What Are The Rarest Snails In The World?

The Partula snails of some South Pacific islands may be the rarest in the world, but they are fighting for survival. Giant African snails were introduced to the islands accidentally, but became a farm pest. So, a meat-eating snail was introduced to control them, but preferred to catch the smaller Partula snails which are \ inch long. The species is now rare, and it is threatened by habitat loss too, but Partula snails are being bred in captivity now to try and save them.

How Do Snails Make Shells?

The mantle is a skin that covers the parts of the snail that stay within the shell. The shell substance is produced by the edge of the mantle. The shell has a horny layer, then an inner, strengthening layer of calcium carbonate. This is the same chemical as chalk.

Are All Ants Sociable?

All ant species are social animals. This means that they live in groups and each of them is given a job to do in the colony. Each colony has at least one egg- laying female, or queen, but she is vastly outnumbered by the ants we usually see, the workers. They are wingless and sterile females-never males.

Which Ants Like A Thorny Home?

The acacia ant makes its small nest just in the spiny tips of twigs of acacia thorn trees in the savanna (dry plains with bushes and trees). The ants get some protection from the thorns, and they keep the tree free of other harmful insects by eating them.

Why Do Ants Need Slaves?

Some ants are forced to act as workers for other species. The slave-maker ant of Europe raids the nests of other species and carries the young back to their own nest. When they hatch out, these new workers act as slaves collecting food, feeding other ants and cleaning the nest. Slavery is used by a few ant species.

Why Do Ants Tap?

When ants tap each other’s antennae, it is a way of communicating. Strong tapping can be a signal of alarm, but in many species, gentle tapping between two ants is a signal for one to give food to the other.

Why Do Ants Have Wings?

Ants’ wings are only used when they mate. Only fully-grown males and females have wings. Workers do not need them. When they land from their mating flights, females that have been fertilized lose their wings, in some cases chewing them off. They then look for a place to start a new colony and have their young.

Which Ants Look After “Cows?”

Several kinds of ant feed on a sweet substance, called honeydew, which is produced by aphids (a small bug, such as a greenfly). Some, like the black garden ant, look after herds of aphid “cows” or females, protecting them from predators and even moving them to new plants on which to feed.

How Do Ants Know Each Other?

Ants probably don’t recognize each other as individuals. But each species has its own chemical messengers, and there may be slight differences between nests too. An ant can recognize another as a nest mate or a stranger by its smell. Chemicals allow the ants to leave scent trails that can be followed by others to good food sources.

How Many Ants Are There In An Ant Nest?

Some estimates put the number of ants in such a nest as high as 7 million. Other species have smaller nests, with numbers ranging from thousands to hundreds. The biggest ant nests are those made by the leaf- cutter ants, some of which travel for 33 feet or more underground.

How Do Ants Grow Mushrooms?

The leaf-cutter ants of tropical America cut out pieces of leaf to take back to their nest and use as a kind of “rrf&nure.” Back in their nests, underground, they chew the leaves and add them to their “garden.” A fungus grows in this garden (each ant species has its own) which makes a nutritious food.

How Do Ants Defend Their Nests?

Many kinds of ant are armed with stings for protection. Others, such as the big wood ant of Europe, can squirt formic acid at enemies. Species with large soldier ants may rely on their jaws to attack invaders. Some species have more specialized ways of keeping trouble out, such as soldiers that block the entrance to the nest with their body.

What Sort Of Home Does A Wasp Have?

A wasp’s nest is made of tough paper, known as carton. The wasps tear wood fibers from trees, posts, and fences and chew them to make this paper. It is carefully molded into shape and then inside it is shaped into six-sided cells that the queen lays her eggs in. The nest may be underground or hanging from a tree.

Are Wasps Any Use?

Many people think that the yellow and black striped wasps are our enemies. These wasps do have a powerful sting, but it is not often used against humans. In fact, they do an enormous amount of good for people, as they collect a lot of caterpillars and insect grubs, many of which are pests. These are taken back to the nest and chewed up as food for the larvae.

How Many Kinds Of Wasp Are There?

There are a surprising number of different kinds of wasp, more than 200,000. Most of them are not the familiar striped social wasps, but are types such as sawflies, wood wasps, sand wasps, and other kinds of hunting wasp.

Where Do Wasps Go In The Winter?

Unlike honeybees, wasps do not store up sweet substances in their nests, so the colony has nothing to survive on in the winter. At the end of the summer, after the new queens have mated, the workers all die. Just the queen survives the winter in hibernation, and she starts a new colony in the spring.

Which Wasp Eats Its Victims Alive?

There are lots of parasitic wasps. These wasps paralyze their victim then lay their eggs inside its body. When the eggs hatch, the larvae feed on the victim from inside it, while it is still alive.

Are Bees Vegetarian?

Yes, bees, unlike their relatives the wasps, are vegetarian. They feed on nectar from flowers. Honeybees have tongues that are made for sucking nectar from shallow flowers. Many bumblebees have longer tongues that can push deep into tube-shaped flowers. Bees also collect pollen from flowers to take back to the nest to fed their young.

How Many Bees Live In A Hive?

In a busy hive there can be up to 80,000 honeybee workers. There will be just one adult queen bee. She may live for as long as five years, and she is the most important member of the hive. The worker bees have an adult life of only about six weeks. The hive may also contain up to 200 male bees (drones) whose only job is to fertilize the queen on a mating flight. Bumblebees have much smaller nests than honeybees. The nest only lasts one season.

How Do Bees Become Queens?

The job that a bee does in the hive depends on what it eats. A queen bee has a special diet. The workers build some large cells for the young queens and start special treatment for them. They are fed on rich food, called royal jelly, produced by glands in the workers’ heads. This allows them to develop into full queens.

Where Is A Bee’s Shopping Basket?

Many bees have a special brush of hairs on each back leg that they use as a shopping basket. When they have collected pollen on their body hairs, they clean it off and gather it all into the pollen basket on the leg. You can often spot a well-filled, yellow pollen basket on a bee.

Why Are Bees Hairy?

Some bumblebees are quite good -at keeping themselves warm when the outside temperature is low, and their furry bodies probably help with this. For most bees, though, a hairy body is useful mainly because it gathers up pollen grains from the flowers as it looks for nectar.

Why Are Bees Good Dancers?

When a bee returns from a successful trip to find pollen, it “dances” on the top of the honeycomb, surrounded by other workers. Its movements during the dance tell the other bees how far away the food source is, and the angle to the sun at which they must fly to reach it.

How Many Flowers A Day Does A Bee Visit?

A honeybee makes about 10 trips from the hive each day looking for food. It can take up to 1,000 flowers to provide enough nectar for a bee on a trip. So, it could be visiting around 10,000 flowers a day.

How Do Aphids Cause Havoc?

Sometimes aphids damage crops just because there are so many of them sucking sap and weakening or killing the plants. In other cases the plants develop deformed leaves that make them useless to sell. Those aphids that fly from plant to plant can also spread serious diseases, injecting them into the plant as they suck sap.

Which Bug Is An Assassin?

Assassin bugs are predators (creatures that prey on other creatures) that use their piercing, sucking mouthparts to impale insects so that they can feed on their body fluids. They inject digestive juices and suck up the resulting “soup.” They may carry their prey on their beaks. A few species suck the blood of animals.

What Insect Makes Sweets?

Some kinds of scaled insects produce a syrupy secretion. As the insect produces the secretion, it dries quickly in the hot climate to form sugary, honeydew lumps. It can then be eaten by humans.

Which Bugs Stink?

The shield bug has quite a flat body that looks like a shield when seen from above. They live on plants, which they eat with their piercing mouthparts. They have glands in their body which produce a smell. In some cases this smells really strong to humans, which is how this bug earned the name stink bug.

Which Bug Followed Us From Our Ancestors Caves?

The bed-bug is a wingless insect that comes out at night and feeds on human blood. In the day, it hides in small, dark places. Bed-bugs attack other warm-blooded animals too. They probably first started attacking humans when our ancestors lived in caves close to other animals. Piles of skins and fur would have provided ideal hideaways. Bed-bugs are rarely a problem in hygienic modern houses.

Which Bug Spends Years Underground?

The periodical cicada of America has a life span of 17 years. Almost all of this time is spent as a larva underground. It digs its way through with its big front legs, and feeds on the sap of plant roots. Other cicadas also spend a lot of time underground, but the periodical cicada holds the record. After this long start, adults sometimes live for just a few weeks.

Which Insect Can Color Food?

Before the days of artificial food colorings, the red color added to food was cochineal. This is made from the crushed, dried bodies of the female cochineal bug, a kind of scale insect that feeds on cacti in Mexico.

How Do Aphids Drink Plant Juice?

Aphids, such as the greenfly that you find on roses, have special piercing tools on their mouths that point downward. These are pushed down into the plant vein and act just like a straw. They inject saliva down one channel of the mouthparts and suck up juices through another.

Which Bugs Feed On Human Blood?

A number of assassin bugs can feed on human blood, but most are not dangerous. One, however, is dangerous, not because of the blood it takes, but because it carries a disease. The South American bug Triatoma infestans carries the germ that causes Chagas’ disease. This illness gives a high fever and a swollen liver, spleen, and lymph nodes.

How Do Cicadas Sing?

Anyone who has been in a warm country has heard the loud calls of cicadas. These bugs make their sound using a kind of drumskin on each side of their abdomen. This skin is pulled in by a muscle, then allowed to snap out again, producing one click in the group of clicks that make up the cicada’s song. Air sacs help to increase the sound.

Why Do Some Flies Look Like Bees?

By trying to look like animals with a dangerous sting, flies may stop many animals from attacking them. The hoverflies, in particular, look like and behave like bees and wasps. The hoverfly Volucella bombylans actually has different forms mimicking different bumblebees. It lays eggs in bumblebee nests too, where its larvae steal the food meant for the bumblebee larvae.

Can You Tell A Fly By Its Wings?

True flies can always be recognized among the insects because they have a single pair of wings rather than four. In fact, the rear wings have been turned into stabilizers. They are club-shaped projections (areas that stick out) from the body that give the fly information about how it is flying.

How Do Flies Feed?

The fly lands on the food-a piece of meat or cheese-and spits on it to soften it. All flies have sucking mouthparts, with pumping muscles in the head, and they use these to suck up the softened food. In many flies, the tip of the mouthparts spreads out to form a sponge to absorb the liquid food. Some, such as horse-flies and mosquitoes, have piercing mouthparts, and take blood from whatever they are feeding on.

Why Do Flies Like Animal Dung?

Many species of fly lay their eggs on dung, which provides a nourishing food for the larvae. The true dung flies have legless larvae which wriggle their way about, sucking in food greedily, until they have grown enough to turn into pupae in the soil below a cow pat.

Why Are Mosquitoes Our Deadly Enemies?

The female mosquito is a bloodsucker, but the diseases she may carry in her saliva are the real danger to humans. In the warmer parts of the world, there is always a danger that a mosquito is carrying the germ that causes malaria. This disease affects a large section of the world population and it makes people very weak and ill.

Which Flies Help The Police With Their Enquiries?

Different species of flies arrive at different stages during the rotting of flesh to lay their eggs. The larvae grow, pupate, and then turn into adults to a fast timetable. This allows a forensic scientist (scientists who study how people have died) to make a good estimate of the time of death. They look at what flies, at what stage of growth, are in a dead body.

How Do Bluebottles Spread Disease?

Bluebottles eat the kind of food that is likely to have bacteria on it, such as rotting vegetation or feces. Often, they will then land on our food, carrying the disease with them to infect an unfortunate human with diarrhea or worse.

What Are “No-See-Ums?”

No-see-ums are North American biting midges. They feed on us, using piercing mouthparts to take blood. Biting midges are all very small flies, but those that attack humans have an irritating bite. Being so small, they often manage to bite before being noticed, which is where the name comes from.

Can Flies Eat Your Living Flesh?

Some flies lay their eggs in the skin of living animals. The larvae hatch and burrow into flesh and feed on it. The warble flies eat the flesh of cattle and deer, causing much irritation. The tumbu fly larva of Africa lives under the skin of humans.

Why Do Humans Avoid The Tsetse Fly?

The tsetse fly is the insect that carries sleeping sickness and can give it to humans. The disease is quite common in wild grazing animals, and doesn’t affect them badly, but it can be devastating to humans. Because it is such a serious disease, humans try to live in areas where the tsetse fly is not known to live.

Why Do Butterflies And Moths Have Eyespots?

The eyespots on the wings of a moth or butterfly can fool a predator into thinking it is a larger animal, and therefore leaving it alone. If it is attacked, the eyespots are more noticeable than the body and head. This can be a lifesaver if a l-iird goes for these first, leaving the butterfly in one piece, apart from a slice out of the wing.

Which Moth Smells Like A Goat?

The goat moth has a larva that produces a strong smell of goat. The larva lives inside a tree for three or four years before it is mature. It can be up to 3 inches long. It can cause serious damage to the tree because it bores through the wood.

Are Moths Poisonous?

Moths do not have a poisonous bite, but many are poisonous to animals that bite them. Often their colors advertise that they have chemical defenses. The cinnabar moth has a caterpillar with black and yellow warning colors that feeds on ragwort, a plant with poisonous sap. The caterpillar isn’t affected by the poison and stores it in its own body. For the rest of its life it carries the poison which only affects those that attack it, never the moth itself.

How Do Tiger Moths Baffle Bats?

Bats hunt tiger moths at night. The bats give out high-pitched sounds and find their prey from the echo that the sounds produce. Tiger moths have “eardrums” on their body. They hear the bats’ cries and keep out of the way. They can even produce high-pitched sounds themselves to confuse the bats.

What Is A Silkworm?

The silkworm is the caterpillar of the mulberry silk moth Bombyx mori. Like many other moth larvae, it can make silk threads, but its cocoon is made of incredibly long threads up to ³A mile long, ideal for spinning into cloth. Silkworms have been bred in captivity for at least 2,000 years in China.

Which Butterfly Is As Big As A Bird?

The Queen Alexandra’s birdwing is the biggest butterfly in the rainforest and in the world. It lives in Papua New Guinea, flitting among the tops of the rainforest trees. Female butterflies may have a wingspan of over 11 inches-twice the width of your outstretched hand! Males are much smaller. Sadly, these beautiful creatures are now very rare because of over trapping by collectors and the destruction of their forest home.

How Far Can Butterflies Fly?

Many butterflies fly very well. Red admiral and painted lady butterflies do not normally survive the winter in Britain. Some North American monarch butterflies fly to Mexico to spend the winter in huge communal roosts. They can fly 1,180 miles in just three weeks.

How Are The Colors Of Butterflies Made?

The wings of butterflies and moths are covered in tiny overlapping scales (their scientific name, Lepidoptera, means scaled wings). Each individual scale can be filled with color, giving the insect its characteristic pattern. In some butterflies, such as the shiny tropical Morpho butterflies, the color is produced by the special structure of the scale as much as the color on it.

What Do Butterflies Like To Eat?

Adult butterflies do not need to grow, so their food needs are for energy rather than protein. The typical butterfly food is nectar from flowers. However, some feed on sap oozing from trees, from rotting fruit, and some, including some of the most beautiful, from dung. They will also take in salts from mud.

How Do You Tell A Butterfly From A Moth?

Butterflies fly by day, have club-shaped antennae, and are often brightly colored. Moths fly by night, have feathery antennae, and are duller colored.