Earwigs are a good place to start! Here’s an adorable picture by Joel Meunier of an earwig and her nymphs:

NO SHE IS NOT EATING THEM! She is picking them up and moving them to a safer location, just like a mother cat will do with her kittens. She will stand guard over them and bring them food for weeks, which is especially interesting considering they are fully capable of fending for themselves almost as soon as they hatch, actually faring quite well when “orphaned.” As long as their mother is present, however, they’ll keep close to her (or maybe she keeps them close?) until they reach a certain size.

Another insect with strong maternal instincts is the female burying beetle, who will remain underground with her larvae and the small corpse (usually a dead rodent) that her mate helped her to bury. There she chews the rotting meat into a paste that the grubs can more easily digest. She dies of old age around the time that they pupate, still beside them. The grave she created as a nursery becomes her grave as well.

Certain cockroaches such as Phlebonotus pallens carry the young under the wings, which may be fused together and arched for this purpose. The young are equipped with temporary fang-like mandibles, allowing them to pierce their mother’s back and feed on her haemolymph or “blood.” She has more than enough!

Certain tortoise beetles like this Acromis sparsa will use their bodies as a shield to protect their eggs and larvae throughout their development, though the larvae have their own interesting defense; anal hooks adapted to collect their own feces. Those are clumps of poo hanging off their tails, making them unpleasant to many predatory tastes. In this case, the young and mother probably both help to protect one another.

There are other protective mothers scattered around the Insecta, but some of their only devoted fathers are certain giant water bugs; the female glues the eggs to the male’s back and just goes on with her life, leaving him to keep them safe and hydrated!

ASK YOUR BUG QUESTIONS! No question too small or too large!

This actually gives me a lot to talk about!

The only bees that die when they sting are certain species of honeybee. They can afford to sacrifice themselves because they live in colonies with hundreds, even thousands of individuals. Their sting is barbed, and its poison gland, believe it or not, has its own nervous system - like a tiny brain. The sting gets torn out in the bee’s enemy, and then keeps on pumping venom all by itself, thus the bee only has to sting once for its foe to be stung many times!

Other bees and wasps have smooth, unbarbed stingers and can keep stinging again and again - if they sting at all, that is. The vast majority of bee species are actually completely stingless, and only a small fraction live in colonies or communal nests at all.

Now, when people think of wasps as aggressive, they’re probably thinking of yellow jackets, which are responsible for the majority of wasp stings. They form large colonies under the ground, and walking or mowing atop them can whip them into a frenzy. Individual yellow jackets out on patrol are a little less likely to attack, but still more trigger-happy than many of their cousins.

Paper wasps, like this one, are also very commonly encountered by humans and have a nasty reputation, but in this case it’s highly undeserved. These wasps form fairly small communities where they collectively care for completely helpless larvae, even chewing food for them like mother birds. They are fiercely protective of these babies, but they only “attack” as an absolute last resort. The last thing they want is to get swatted and leave their young to starve, so they’ll keep a close eye on you and start buzzing around you if you start to worry them, but it’s mostly for show.

People tend to kill nests of these wasps on sight and many products are marketed for doing so, but I - and many people I know - have always left them alone and never been stung, even when the nests were near doorways, patios or other active areas of a home. Like with spiders, you’ll usually only be stung if you corner them, step on them barefoot or otherwise force it.

Exceptions do happen, of course, especially since wasps are very scent-oriented, and can read certain odors as threats. I’ve heard some people swear that paper wasps have landed on and stung them for “no reason,” and they were always wearing some pungent cologne or perfume at the time.

As with bees, the majority of wasps are completely solitary, and these are especially non-aggressive, unless you’re another insect. Most of them are parasitoids, and use their stings exclusively to paralyze the caterpillars, cockroaches, spiders or other arthropods they use as living brood chambers for their parasitic larvae.

Wasps in general, parasitoid or otherwise, are some of the most important of all insect predators, providing quite possibly the largest natural service in regulating the populations of other insects. It’s unfortunate that people exterminate them on sight, when it’s really quite easy to live in peace with them, and they do a better job of controlling other insects than any man-made chemical.

Both parasitic and predatory wasps are actually of enormous benefit to the ecosystem, as they do more to regulate insect populations than any other natural process. It’s a shame that humans tend to exterminate them on sight, when most wasps are fairly easy to live in peace with and will keep other “pests” under control more effectively than any store bought chemicals.

On a final note, ants are actually just a highly specialized group of wasps, but are still a whole vast subject in themselves, so I’ll wait to get into ants if I’m asked about them specifically!

ASK ME A BUG QUESTION HERE!

Even in scientific circles, it’s a common misconception that a spider feeds by “drinking” through its two fangs, like a vampire. In reality, the fangs can only inject venom and digestive enzymes into prey, not suck anything back in. The actual mouth is a small, jawless opening beneath the fang-bearing chelicerae.

It’s like a walrus with venomous tusks!

adorablespiders:

here have a happy face spider

Every single time I see a happy face spider, I also see this:

…But with a spider.

(Source: google.com)

sixthrock:

theclaydoughproject:

The Macro World: Grasshopper Army

Oh my god look at them EEE LITTLE CUTIES LET ME COVER MYSELF IN MILLIONS OF YOU LITTLE SWEETIES

BETTER THAN KITTENS AND PUPPIES COMBINED

See? Moray eels can grow very accustomed to human contact! Some divers have even “befriended” specific morays in the wild, which supposedly come out to greet them and get their heads scratched. Of course, you still have to be careful around something with razor-sharp fangs and a fairly strong bite.

theartofanimation:

Innokenti Korshunov

This is absolutely gorgeous and kicks ass all over the place, I love the roach/wasp babies :)

This is how I wish kid’s movies about insects looked. They don’t need anthropomorphized faces to have personality at all.

sixthrock:

I DID ANOTHER THING

Yes, I know what it looks like that brown rat is doing, shut up.

Everybody who follows me would probably love sixthrock’s art including the rest of her monster alphabet thus far.

Rat Kings were a bizarre urban legend that I don’t think could possibly be depicted more lovably than this.

This Rhagoletis fruit fly is a living optical illusion!

Here’s how its markings might look to a spider:

And here’s what that spider would probably think it sees:

A bigger spider might still attack, but smaller ones are unlikely to risk it.

Full article by Alex Wild here.

Baby earwig clinging to a pinhead (from here)

Another wonderful moment from Axe Cop, which is written via input by the artist’s currently six year old brother.

The number of people on the internet who say they’re terrified of even a picture of a spider seriously disturbs me. Years I ago I would have thought only the most extreme, freakish cases of arachnophobic mania could be that severe, but almost any well-trafficked website that posts an image of a spider will get comments freaking out about how the merest glimpse of arachnid-shaped pixels on the screen gave them some sort of aneurysm.

It’s unhealthy enough for anybody to be terrified of such harmless, fragile little animals, but for so many people to be that arachnophobic makes me actually feel sick to think about. It’s obscenely unnatural and nobody else seems to think it’s a problem.

Within my lifetime alone, I can remember when snakes, bats and frogs were much more widely reviled and vilified in popular culture than they are now. In just a couple decades, their public images have shown a dramatic improvement - they’re all much more popular, more respected and more admired than I remember them being in only first grade. Revulsion of spiders, on the other hand, just seems to be increasingly embraced, excused and defended.

We could easily teach kids to fear spiders less, and it would work, but barely anybody seems to want to.

I’ve probably posted this before, but here it is again!

These are the larvae of, I believe, spiny lobsters. They float in the ocean water feeding on plankton, and are as flat as paper.

Photographed by Alex Wild, this is the face of what is sometimes called a “jumping stick insect,” but it’s actually a stick-mimic grasshopper.

How can anybody look at a goofy space-creature face like this and still think insects are “gross?”

adorablespiders:

“i’m sorrrrrrry :<”