Anyway while we’re on the subject of public misconception towards living things (which is completely understandable because have you SEEN living things? There’s like dozens of them!) here’s a fresh rundown of some common mistakes about bugs!
- Arachnids aren’t just spiders! They’re also scorpions, mites, ticks and some real weirdos out there
- Insects with wings are always finished growing! Wings are the last new thing they ever develop! There can never be a “baby bee” that’s just a smaller bee flying around.
- That said, not all insects have larvae! Many older insect groups do look like little versions of adults….but the wings rule still applies.
- Insects do have brains! Lobes and everything!
- Only the Hymenoptera (bees, ants and wasps) have stingers like that.
- Not all bees and wasps live in colonies with queens
- The only non-hymenoptera with queens are termites, which is convergent evolution, because termites are a type of cockroach!
- There are still other insects with colonial lifestyles to various degrees which can include special reproductive castes, just not the whole “queen” setup.
- Even ants still deviate from that; there are multi-queen ant species, some species where the whole colony is just females who clone themselves and other outliers
- There is no “hive mind;” social insects coordinate no differently from schools of fish, flocks of birds, or for that matter crowds of humans! They’re just following the same signals together and communicating to each other!
- Not all mosquito species carry disease, and not all of them bite people
- Mosquitoes ARE ecologically very important and nobody in science ever actually said otherwise
- The bite of a black widow is so rarely deadly that the United States doesn’t bother stocking antivenin despite hundreds of reported bites per year. It just feels really really bad and they give you painkillers.
- Recluse venom does damage skin, but only in the tiny area surrounding the bite. More serious cases are due to this dead skin inviting bacterial infection, and in fact our hospitals don’t carry recluse antivenin either; they just prescribe powerful antibiotics, which has been fully effective at treating confirmed bites.
- Bed bugs are real actual specific insects
- “Cooties” basically are, too; it’s old slang for lice
- Crane flies aren’t “mosquito hawks;” they actually don’t eat at all!
- Hobo spiders aren’t really found to have a dangerous bite, leaving only widows and recluses as North America’s “medically significant” spiders
- Domestic honeybees actually kill far more people than hornets, including everywhere the giant “murder” hornet naturally occurs.
- Wasps are only “less efficient” pollinators in that less pollen sticks to them per wasp. They are still absolutely critical pollinators and many flowers are pollinated by wasps exclusively.
- Flies are also as important or more important to pollination than bees.
- For “per insect” pollination efficiency it’s now believed that moths also beat bees
- Honeybees are non-native to most of the world and not great for the local ecosystem, they’re just essential to us and our food industry
- Getting a botfly is unpleasant and can become painful, but they aren’t actually dangerous and they don’t eat your flesh; they essentially push the flesh out of the way to create a chamber and they feed on fluids your immune system keeps making in response to the intrusion. They also keep this chamber free of bacterial infection because that would harm them too!
- Botflies also exist in most parts of the world, but only one species specializes partially in humans (and primates in general, but can make do with a few other hosts)
- “Kissing bugs” are a group of a couple unusual species of assassin bug. Only the kissing bugs evolved to feed on blood; other assassin bugs just eat other insects.