Quotes About Insects

The classic example from biology is the huge, towerlike structure that is built by some ant and termite species. These structures only emerge when the ant colony reaches a certain size (more is different) and could never be predicted by studying the behavior of single insects in small colonies.

The fruit fly has roughly 150,000 neurons in the brain.

Blow spiders!

Hip, I murmur, remembering last night, how I lost it completely in a stall at Nell's---my mouth foaming, all I could think about were insects, lots of insects, and running at pigeons, foaming at the mouth and running at pigeons.

Everything is made of words, and the words had done their job. I could even say they had done it well. They had risen in a confusing swarm and spun around in spirals, ever higher, colliding and separating, golden insects, messengers of friendship and knowledge, higher, higher, into that region of the sky where the day turns into night and reality into dreams, regal words on their nuptial flight, always higher, until their marriage is finally consummated at the summit of the world.

have our brains retained or even reinvented aesthetics that arose in other lines of life? If so, our convergence with insects is a mystery worthy of awe for the little elders at our feet and flitting among the the flowers of our gardens. Regardless of who gets our thanks for the honor, there is no more wondrous fact than that we are kin, bee and bird of paradise- and great elephant- stardust, all.

For their surface area, insects weigh very little. A beetle, falling from a high altitude, quickly achieves terminal velocity: air resistance prevents it from falling very fast, and, after alighting on the ground, it will walk away, apparently none the worse for the experience… In contrast, human beings are characteristically maimed or killed by any fall of more than a few dozen feet: because of our size, we weigh too much for our surface area.

There is no need for ants to have the ability to fly

Outside insects or maybe frogs were making the noise of phone calls. Vertical blinds drifted like bars being moved for a great escape. When you slapped a mosquito against the wall you shook the place.

Men were good for one thing only. Killing spiders.

Toads, beetles, bats.

He saw them as a mob, carried away by their own bloodlust, and just as easily manipulated by their rulers as their entertainers. A crowd of otherwise intelligent or moderate individuals, could become a hive of unthinking insects, hornets incited by a wave of the hand or the proclamation of a meaningless slogan.

She called to them: the cicadas , the moths, the beetles, and fireflies, the little gnats and mosquitos, the thousands and thousands of little mosquitos. And they responded, their tiny voices swelling, coming together like a song, filling the woods with their melody as they flew to her, swarming and swirling together like a growing storm cloud.

Hey, we all have our fear. Mine is bugs and lobsters!

One of the most famous aphorisms in science is the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane's answer to the question, What might one conclude about God based on a study of His creation? "An inordinate fondness for beetles.

Most active winter bugs can supercool their bodies to a range of–6 to–12 degrees Celsius, going lower by producing more glycerol and dropping the water content in their bodies.

The genus Drosophila is one of the great success stories. There's hundreds of species within the genus. They're on every continent except Antarctica, they're in tropical rain forests, they're in deserts, they've evolved many exotic mating behaviors, and they're capable of incredibly long-distance flights.

I took the stone bowl in both hands and poured out my time onto the ground drowning hapless insects feeding the weeds until the sun stood looking down and stole the stain. Seeing in the vessel's cup a thousand cracks a thousand cracks I looked back the way I came and saw a trail green with memories lost whoever made this bowl was a fool but the greater he who carried it. Stone

Bloodflies rode her drawn gasps into her mouth, biting as she gagged and spat.

The voracious insects waited for storms like this one, then rode the winds in search of prey.

Abroad little towns seemed to possess a bustling other-life, like insects below the grass. There were often mysteries to uncover, mysteries that could be cherished like gems unexpectedly discovered in a rock that had seemed uniformly grey. Here, the social structure demanded a different kind of behaviour-upright, polite, mannered-but that usually meant mysteries, when they were coaxed from hiding, were all the more delightful and perverse.

lepidopterists give the noun a gerund's push toward the verb, and say that butterflies are nectaring...

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

I have not eaten a lot of insects. I ate a termite in Africa, but it was on a bet. It was a soldier termite. It was alive, and I don't really recommend the live soldier termite as something you want to start with if you're going to start exploring eating insects.