Class: insecta

Insects are familiar to most people, but not necessarily well understood. Insects are arthropods (meaning “jointed-foot”), animals which have jointed legs and a segmented body with an exoskeleton. This includes insects, as well as spiders, crabs, centipedes, and more.

Insects are most easily distinguished by having 6 legs, which is not true of any other animals except a handful of other closely related arthropods. Centipedes are therefore not insects, nor are snails (they are not even arthropods, but gastropods).

Insects are incredibly diverse and prolific. They are so diverse than by species count, insects alone represent more than half of all known organisms (not just animals!). In addition, despite their small size, insects represent a significant portion of the biomass of Earth - it is thought that there are more ants than humans by weight.

Because of the great number of insect species, the sometimes extreme difficulty of species-level identification, and the lack of thorough, reliable resources available to laypersons, I make no attempt at comprehensively cataloguing the insects of my area. I simply enjoy the ones around me and celebrate the ones I really like.

Insects are largely divided into families which can generally be distinguished simply by their body shape. These families are often named after the wing structure (“ptera” in the family names means “wing”). Sometimes, the details of the wing structure are not easily seen, but general body shape can usually inform a family-level identification.

Catalogue

Order Coleoptera (Beetles)

1 species in catalogue

Order Diptera (True Flies)

1 species in catalogue

Order Hemiptera (True Bugs)

1 species in catalogue

Order Neuroptera (Net-winged Insects)

1 species in catalogue

Order Orthoptera (Grasshoppers and Crickets)

1 species in catalogue