Current location - Recipe Complete Network - Dietary recipes - How many kinds of insects are there?
How many kinds of insects are there?
There are more than 6,543,800 known insect species, but there are still many species to be discovered. Insects are the largest species and quantity in the animal kingdom, which have great influence on agricultural production and human health. The most common ones are locusts, butterflies, bees, dragonflies, flies, Cao Meng, cockroaches and so on.

Insects belong to arthropods among invertebrates, and are the largest animal group on the earth, accounting for more than 50% of all biological species (including bacteria, fungi and viruses), and their traces are almost all over the world.

Extended data:

According to the most suitable activity places of the main insect States, they can be roughly divided into five categories.

1. Insects living in the air: Most of these insects are active in the daytime, and they have grown wings in the adult stage and usually have developed mouthparts, so adults have a long life. Such as bees, wasps, dragonflies, flies, mosquitoes, fireflies, butterflies and so on. During aerial activities, insects mainly migrate and spread, looking for food, mating and choosing spawning grounds.

2. Insects living on the surface: These insects have no wings, or they have wings but are not good at flying, or they only crawl and jump. Some flying insects also live on the ground in the larval and pupal stages. Some parasitic insects and insects that feed on decaying plants and animals (including insects that live indoors with humans) are also mostly active on the surface.

Insects active on the ground account for the vast majority of all insect species, because the ground is the location and habitat of insect food. This kind of common insects are walking insects (fart insects) and cockroaches.

3. Insects living in the soil: These insects feed on the roots of plants and humus in the soil. Because of their activities in the soil and their consumption of plant roots, they have become a great harm to agriculture, fruit trees and seedlings.

These insects are most afraid of light, and most species have poor mobility and migration ability. They rarely go underground during the day, and the most suitable time for their activities is at night and rainy days. This kind of common insects are mole crickets, cutworms (larvae of Noctuidae) and cicada larvae.

4. Insects living in water: Some insects live in water all their lives, such as midges, turtles, midges, midges and so on. Coleoptera lice and water turtles. Some insects, such as dragonflies, stone moths, ephemera, etc. , just living in the water larvae (especially called larvae).

The same characteristics of aquatic insects are: the valves on the body side are degenerated, while the valves on both ends of the body are developed or special tracheal gills are used to replace the valves for breathing; Most species have flat hairy swimming feet, which play the role of paddling.

5. Parasitic insects: These insects are relatively small and have poor mobility. Most species of larvae have no feet or can no longer walk, and their vision is impaired. Some parasitic insects, such as fleas and lice, live on the surface of mammals all their lives. Others are parasitic in animals, such as horse stomach flies.

Other insects are parasitic on other insects, which is beneficial to human beings. They can be used to control pests, which is called biological control. These insects mainly include wasps, wasps, cocoon bees and flies. Among parasitic insects, there is another phenomenon called heavy parasitism.

That is, when a parasitic bee or fly is parasitic on a herbivorous insect, another parasitic insect is parasitic on the previous parasitic insect. Some species can also carry out double or triple parasitism. For insects, these phenomena are just an instinct for survival and competition.

Baidu encyclopedia-insects