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Whether he's photographing snowflakes, or the coiled shell of a snail, German photographer Matthias Lenke has a way of bringing out the details in his subjects — but he does an especially breathtaking job with insects. We think you'll agree. More »
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Mammals generally have evolved the same basic, boring way for males to fertilize an egg: just send a bunch of tiny individual sperm into the female reproductive organs. But in insects like the diving beetle, it gets way more insane. More »
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These stunning snapshots are from a series by Japanese photographer Tsuneaki Hiramatsu, who employed a variety of time-lapse techniques to capture the awe-inspiring beauty of fireflies in flight. More »
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We all know ants are incredibly capable creatures. They live in vast, interconnected colonies, can lift several times their own body weight, and coordinate their activity with incredible precision. More »
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When we imagine great predators like bears, lions, sharks, and the T. rex, they're generally just chowing down on whatever hapless animal wanders in front of them. But if beetles are anything to go by, predators have a surprisingly nutritious diet. More »
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Something is very wrong with the bees. Since 2006, the mysterious phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder has wiped out countless honeybee colonies throughout Europe and North America, and nobody knows why. But a weird parasite may hold the answer. More »
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Are you a fan of embiggened bugs? Alex Wild — master of ceremonies over at Myrmecos — has just posted over 600 of his best photographs from 2011, and it is one of the most jaw-dropping collections of insect macrophotography we've ever seen. Click through to check it out — you won't be disappointed. More »
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The Australian island Tasmania is home to two species of millipedes. These insects only ever meet on a tiny, 300 feet wide patch of land running right down the island. It's a bizarre arrangement, and it has biologists completely baffled. More »
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Researchers who synthesized an artificial sex pheromone have just discovered that it's most useful application so far is . . . killing cockroaches? More »
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When it comes time for honeybee swarm to split off from their mother colony and find a new place to live, something remarkable happens. To communicate most effectively, they organize themselves exactly like the neurons of a complex brain. More »
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Bedbugs were pretty much wiped out in the United States back in the 1950s, but over the past decade they've returned with a vengeance. They're tougher and more resistant to insecticides than ever before, and it's all due to inbreeding. More »
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Admittedly, there's not much competition, but I'm declaring fig wasps to be the most gallant of all wasps. Males are the only known insects to put pregnant females ahead of themselves...even if they haven't had a chance to mate yet. More »
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Fairy wasps are some of the tiniest creatures on Earth, an entire insect roughly the size of a single-celled organism like an amoeba. That means their individual cells must be incredibly tiny...and that requires losing much of their nervous system. More »
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Rove beetles have come up with a truly novel way to ensure monogamy. After a male has mated with a female, he injects her with a chemical that makes her smell so bad that all other prospective suitors stay away. More »
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Humans aren't the only animals that have to guard against potential infection during sex. Fruit flies are at greatly increased risk of infection during their mating season, which is why the male's mating call actually boosts the female's immune system. More »
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The ant species Leptothorax acervorum is found throughout the Northern hemisphere. While many populations have multiple queens, a few have only one queen that reproduces. And in those societies, queens and workers alike viciously fight for ant dominance. More »
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When bees leave their old hive, they send out hundreds of scouts to find possible locations for the new hive. This quest for prime bee real estate quickly devolves into another battle between art-forms: specifically, bee dancing vs. bee singing. More »
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What if there was a virus that could not only kill you, but actually compel you to go out and infect as many of your friends as possible? Such a virus exists — in caterpillars at least — and now a team of researchers have identified the viral gene responsible for the bizarre behavior it engenders. More »
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If you spend your life studying insects of the order hymenoptera, which includes wasps, bees and ants, you're going to get stung a few times. Justin Schmidt, entomologist at the University of Arizona, never intentionally set out to get stung by as many different species as possible, but entomologist fieldwork involves bagging live nests for study. When you dig an ant nest out of the ground or climb a tree to bag a wasp nest, the hymenopterans inside are generally pissed off. They sting. More »
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Females of certain fruit fly species mate with multiple males, which gives the males motivation to mate for as long as they possibly can. But in species where the female chooses only one mate for life, males are still jealously protective...but why? More »
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Many kinds of human engineering have biological equivalents - the most famous is probably the ball and socket joint, which is found in car steering columns and human arms alike. The newest and weirdest example is insects with screw-and-nut legs. More »
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Ants are defined by their cooperation and teamwork...but one species is a huge jerk about it. Whenever these ants encounter a task they can't do on their own, they go back to their colony and essentially kidnap some help. More »
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All winged insects look more or less the same: a main thorax that's split into three segments, two legs on each segment, and four wings. But there's one exception, and it's spectacularly weird. Meet the massive "helmets" of treehopper insects. More »
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Approximately 100,000 Americans are afflicted with Ekbom Syndrome, a psychological disorder in which sufferers believe that they're infested with insects. Ekbom sufferers are reluctant to get psychological treatment, as they believe bugs are the cause of their discomfort. And when an entomologist suffers from Ekbom Syndrome, the result is one of the most skin-crawling scientific papers imaginable. More »
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The insect known as S. invicta, or the fire ant, will bite the crap out of you, join up with its buddies to swarm everywhere, and ruin everything in its path. And they're everywhere! The truly scary part is that they didn't used to be so ubiquitous - in fact, fire ants used to live in a relatively small area in Argentina. But about a century ago, they made it to the southern United States - most likely as stowaways on boats. And that's when things got weird. Once the ant invaders created a successful colony in the southern U.S., they launched successful invasions of California, the Caribbean, China, Taiwan and Australia. A group of researchers have identified at least nine separate invasions launched by those original fire ant invaders. How did they do it? More »
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Plants use photosynthesis to turn sunlight into energy every single day. This ability appeared to be completely unknown in the animal kingdom, leaving the living solar battery that is Superman as the only animal to ever harness the sun's rays for power. But now we've discovered that a type of hornet is doing its own homegrown photosynthesis, absorbing sunlight and turning it into useful energy. It's the first animal we've ever discovered that possesses this ability...and we might be able to harness our own version of it for alternative energy. More »
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The splay-footed cricket is one of the biggest, most scary-looking insects, and it's been that way for a long, long time. A fossil recently uncovered in Brazil reveals these crickets have looked more or less exactly the same since the time of the dinosaurs. Clearly, these insects don't adapt - they make the world adapt to them. More »
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A species of bush cricket is in possession of nature's most ridiculously over-sized testicles - these balls are 14% of the bug's body mass. The crickets need all that extra sperm storage just to ensure they'll have offspring. More »
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Slavemaker ants raid other ant colonies to bring back pupae, who then grow up to be the labor force. Now it turns out these social parasites show remarkable strategy and intelligence in choosing their future slaves. More »
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The reaction that makes fireflies luminescent has been understood for along time. How they switch themselves on and off, though, is a fairly recent discovery. Find out how fireflies light up, and how they blink off. More »
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When a group of flies dive-bomb towards your plate, chances are you'll instinctively swat the buggers, riling them up further. But are you actually making the flies angry? A recent Caltech study confirms that male flies indeed have "rage" pheromones. More »
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An ant species native to the South American region has completely eliminated males from its population. Mycocepurus smithii, a fungus-gardening ant, reproduces without any males whatsoever, and has been doing it for millions of years. More »
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It's no secret that many scientists are great fans of science fiction, and sometimes tributes to characters and authors end up in their work. We list 30 species, alive and extinct, that bear scifi-themed names. More »
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Here you can see an ant shooting a dose of venom straight into a centipede's head. The centipede is translucent, so you can actually see the stinger in its brain. And there's more. More »
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In this video of mosquitoes on the verge of mating, scientists reveal something that laypeople might already have known. Even in the act of love, mosquitoes are really annoying. More »
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Bees that are high on cocaine behave more altruistically than sober bees do. Scientists report today in The Journal of Experimental Biology that coked-up bees are much more enthusiastic about helping other bees find food. More »
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If you watch enough TV, you get the idea that the ideal mating combination is a skinny little woman and a burly man. But a new evolutionary study published in American Naturalist shows that's not what nature intended. In fact, the humble New Zealand weta (a relative of the cricket) demonstrates that evolution often pushes in the other direction: Only the smallest and most nimble weta males get to score with the sexy weta ladies who are twice their size. How could tiny males impress the weta females? More »
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A Brazilian wasp has evolved a very peculiar mind-control power in order to reproduce: It induces love in a species of caterpillar. The wasp lays its eggs in a baby caterpillar, which grows normally as the eggs grow inside it. Eventually, larvae burst out of the caterpillar's body, and that's when things get weird. The caterpillar covers the larvae with silk, and will protect them quite violently until they are full-grown wasps (you can see that in this picture). In fact, the caterpillar refuses to eat or leave until the wasps hatch. More »
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