Insects CLASS READINGS HOMEWORK – Set‐up & Test Your Own iNaturalist Account (see Class 3 – Reptiles). BRING YOUR SMART DEVICE WITH iNaturalist loaded. STUDY: Insect Trail Card How Many Animal Species are There? (National Geographic, Williams, April 2013) Some Help with the Insects! (Heistand & Wirka, 2015) Fun & Fascinating Facts about Insects (Wirka, 2011) Chart: Insect Wing Beats per Second (Wirka, 2010) Insects in Winter – How & Where Some Insects Overwinter (Hands on Nature) Harvester Ants at Bouverie Preserve Once Stung, Twice Shy (Bay Nature Magazine, Kaplan, 2008) Why do Dragonflies Swarm (Bay Nature Magazine, Ellis, 2008) A Preliminary List of Butterflies of Bouverie Preserve (iNaturalist, Wirka, August 2015) Pollinator Derby (Wirka & Heistand) CalNat: The California Naturalist Handbook Chapter 6: 153‐160 Key Concepts By the end of this class, we hope you will be Understand and explain the rudiments of insect able to: flight; its advantages and limitations, Identify some of the major groups (orders) of Feel more confident about sparking curiosity insects by their anatomy, and interest in 3rd and 4th grade learners by leading insect hunts in the soil, on flowers, in Share a few amazing facts about the number bark, under rocks, and and importance of Earth’s insect life, Use iNaturalist to make observations, identify Understand and explain what makes an insect species & access natural history information. an insect (insect anatomy), Describe a few of the ways that different insects grow and develop, Know a few things about the most common animal order on earth (rhymes with “needle”), Recommended Resources ACR & iNaturalist Websites On the Bouverie Docent pages of the website (log in to use) 1. Identification of insects by order 2. Pollinator Derby – a set of trail cards to use with kids in the spring to search for pollinators on particular types of flowers https://www.egret.org/user On the iNaturalist Website 1. Common insects of Bouverie Preserve, iNaturalist field guide https://www.inaturalist.org/guides/3941 2. A preliminary list of Butterflies of Bouverie Preserve on iNaturalist www.inaturalist.org/guides/2119 Trail Tip Other Websites Observing harvester ant nests is a highlight for many children Need help with an insect ID? Upload your picture at www.bugguide.net visiting Bouverie, especially in and let the conversation begin. This site is a great online community of the fall. To give your learners a naturalists who enjoy learning about and sharing observations of chance to watch ants in action, insects, spiders, and other related creatures. try placing a row of 5-6 dry grass stems across the entrance to a Welcome to the wonderful world of insects. Fun facts & info to share busy harvester ant nest. http://www.earthlife.net/insects/ Watch what happens and use The California Academy of Sciences webpage has a long list of links to the 3 Levels of Questioning sites full of insect info of interest to bug lovers of all ages. while observing the worker ants https://www.calacademy.org/scientists/entomology come out and move the grass stems away from the nest Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation http://www.xerces.org/ entrance. This can be quite amusing as some groups of ants The Beetle Ring hosts a ponderous number of sites about beetles will seem to be working at cross http://www.naturalworlds.org/beetlering/index.htm purposes to each other. Art Shapiro’s Butterfly Site has 34 years of butterfly data collected by If you watch long enough, you’ll U.C. Davis professor of Evolution and Ecology notice that each of the items blocking the nest will be moved http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/ about the same distance away For more about butterflies and moths of North America, visit from the entrance. www.butterfliesandmoths.org; Check out Kathy Biggs’ excellent online guide to California dragonflies and damselflies http://sonic.net/dragonfly Recommended Reading Ants at Work by Deborah Gordon. (The Free Press, 1999). Great resource for delving into the lives of harvester ants. Bugs Rule! By Whitney Cranshow & Richard Redak (Princeton University Press, 2013). A basic introduction to the biology and diversity of insects and their importance to the environment and to humans; with great photographs, illustrations, little known facts, and sidebars. Butterflies through Binoculars, The West by Jeffrey Glassberg (Oxford University Press, 2001). California Insects by Jerry Powell & Charles Hogue. (University of California Press, 1980). Another Trail Tip Common Butterflies of California by Bob Stewart. (West Coast Lady Consider the Wee Beastie Safari as Press, 1997). a great lunchtime event! Place a 3- foot length of string or yarn in a line Common Dragonflies of California: A Beginner’s Pocket Guide by Kathy or circle on an interesting stretch of Biggs (Azalea Creek Publishing, 2009). ground. Then, focus your students’ attention on the area along the line Dragonflies & Damselflies of California by Tim Manolis (University of or within the circle. California Press, 2003). Take 5 or 10 minutes for careful Field Guide to Beetles of California by Arthur Evans and James Hogue observation of the soil, plants, and/or (University of California Press, 2006). insect life in this limited area. Give everyone a hand lens, and invite Field Guide to Insects of North America by Kenn Kaufman and Eric Eaton them to imagine what it would like if (Hillstar Editions, L.C., 2007). you were the size of an ant actually hiking along this line or within the Field Guide to the Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay Area and circle. Sacramento Valley Region by Arthur Shapiro and Tim Manolis (University of California Press, 2007). Learners can work in pairs or individually, taking turns looking and For the Love of Insects by Thomas Eisner. (Belnap Press , 2003). telling what they see, until no one can find anything that hasn’t already Forgotten Pollinators by Stephen L. Buchmann, Gary Paul Nabhan & been mentioned. Paul Mirocha (Island Press, 1997). Golden Guide: Insects by Herbert Zimm & Clarence Cottam (Western Publishing Company, 1987). Insects and Flowers: The Biology of a Partnership by Friedrich Barth (Princeton University Press, 1985) A fascinating discussion of the relationship of insects and flowers from a pollination ecologist’s perspective. Great photos of insect and flower anatomy. Moths of Western North America by Jerry Powell and Paul Opler (Regents of the University of California, 2009). Natural History of Pollination by Michael Proctor, Peter Yeo, & Andrew Lack (Timber Press, 2003). A fairly technical book with great information. How many animal species are there? From National Geographic Magazine (April 2013). Accessed online June 20 2013 ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/04/125-explore/seeking-new-species In the 1730s Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus set out rules for classifying species, the most basic biological category: a group of living things that look alike and normally mate only with each other. Since then, scientists have cataloged more than 1.7 million. But there’s still a lot of work to be done. Estimates of the total number of species range from 3 million to 100 million; one new study puts the figure at 8.7 million, give or take a million. The numbers at right, compiled from many surveys and statistical projections, offer the best guess for species in selected categories. - A. R. Williams Some help with the insects! There are so many insects on the planet that identifying them to species is very difficult for most of us. Even identifying them to their biological family is sometimes impossible for all but the most skilled entomologist. However, it is relatively easy to identify them to their “order” (the category above “family” but below “class”) by learning a few basic features and understanding what the scientific name for each order means. This guide is designed to help you do that in one page! Fun and Fascinating Facts about I nsects Insects are the most diverse group of organisms on the planet. That means that there are more species of insects than any other group. There are approximately 1,000,000 (one million) known species of living insects in the world. How does this compare to other organisms? Animals (vertebrates and invertebrates) account for nearly 1.4 million species. Thus insects represent over 70 percent of all animal species on the planet! If you include all of the other known non-animal species (plants, fungi, protists, algae— everything except bacteria!), there are about 1.7 million known species of organisms. Thus, insects account for roughly 60 percent of all living species (again, excluding bacteria). The number of mammals is minute compared to insects. There are just over 5000 species of mammals known in the world. Here’s a reality check for you: there are as many species of cockroach (an insect) as there are species of mammals on the planet! Beetles alone account for about 350,000 species, or just over 1/3 of all of the insect species. Beetles are therefore the largest group of animals on earth. Some perspective on pests: there are an estimated 2000 to 2500 species of pest insects (those that cause problems for agriculture or human health) worldwide. This means that pest species account for only 0.0001% of all insect species But this is just the tip of the Insecta Iceberg. There are many more species of insects out there that we know nothing about. Some entomologists estimate the number of undiscovered insects to be 2 million species (about twice the number we know now), but others think it could be as many as 30 million. How much biomass do insects account for? According to the Smithsonian Encyclopedia, insects are thought to have the largest biomass of all terrestrial animals. It is estimated that there are some 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive at any given time.