Insects

7 articles
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    Why We Should Eat Crickets. And Other Bug Ideas

    As the human population expands, we are going to have to find better ways to feed ourselves without further decimating the environment.Photograph by Koldunova Anna / Shutterstock In his new book, The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World, Edward Melillo calls some insects “little laboratories,” the various productions of which have […]
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    How Swarming Insects Act Like Fluids

    Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Starlings take to the sky in swirling vortices; ants teem like rivers. “They stretch, they move around, but they retain cohesion in a way you’d expect from a fluid moving,” said Nicholas Ouellette, a physicist at Stanford University. That’s why to him, it isn’t far-fetched to think about collective animal behavior in the […]
  • Dupzyk_HERO

    We Need Insects More Than They Need Us

    Inside the world of plastic-eating worms, dung-rolling beetles, and agricultural ants..
  • McNeal_HERO-3

    Manhattan’s God of Insects

    Lawrence Forcella reminds us why we loved bugs as kids.
  • King_HERO

    If Bugs Are Sentient, Should We Eat Them?

    The ethics of eating insects.
  • Moor_HERO

    The Caterpillar Watcher

    Charles Bonnet discovered insect trails but became famous for his hallucinations.

  • Ant vs beetle larva

    The Beetle That Eavesdrops on an Ant’s Secret Language

    Before noon in the Soconusco region of southern Chiapas, down by the border where Mexico meets Guatemala, the lush, green terrain is rife with bodies in motion. It is an area abutting the Pacific, a vast collection of plantations, most of them growing coffee. Hsun-Yi Hsieh, a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, has […]