Most people associate the ladybug with love, good luck, devotion of faith or even as something to wish upon, giving one hope of fulfilling an inner wish. They are also known for their beautiful red and black spotted bodies. There are about 5,000 species that are known to live in the world and 400 of those live in North America. That number could be even higher, if the beetle was able to stow away on vegetation being imported. They are the state insect of Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Tennessee. ("Everything about Ladybugs") But the ladybug is much more; a creature that starts its extremely short life span as an egg could add and do so much for our world that without them much could be altered, including, devastation to our crops which ultimately would affect our food supply.
The ladybug got its name in the middle ages when aphids were taking over and destroying farmers crops. Not knowing what to do about this, they began to pray. The people beseeched to the Virgin Mary to help in the swarm. Not long after, beetles appeared and started eating the aphids that were destroying their crops. The farmers named them ‘The Beetles of Our Lady’ which was soon shortened to what we know them as today, the ladybug. ("Lost Ladybug")
The life of a ladybug begins with the female laying 10-50 internally fertilized eggs in masses which then hatch into six (6) legged larvae. Just a few weeks after the egg hatches into larvae, they will feed on aphids and mites on the carefully placed leaf by their mother. Much like butterflies, the ladybug also goes through a pupa stage. After a few weeks of eating and molting, they begin the metamorphis state. In just a few short days, the sack will split open and a full-grown ladybug will emer...
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...e can grow and harvest crops that we do. Without them, we would not have as many healthy plants and that could affect our food supply as well as our pocketbook; the fewer crops we have, the more in demand they will be and the more out of pocket we would have to pay.
Works Cited
. Enchanted Learning. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Apr 2014. .
Ember, Steve. "Insects Eating Your Crops? Call on a Ladybug." Learning English. N.p., 04/10/2006. Web. 11 Apr 2014. .
. "Ladybug Facts." Everything about Ladybugs. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Apr 2014. .
. "All About Ladybugs." Lost Ladybug. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Apr 2014. .
Bess beetles range in size all the way from 21 millimeters to 80 millimeters. The beetles are named after the French word baiser, which means “to kiss”, due to the fact that they often make a smooching sound with their legs. They have a small horn that protrudes from their head, and use their antennae to drive them forward when experiencing new smells. Though the beetles may look quite menacing, they are surprisingly docile. They enjoy feasting on rotten wood, moss, and adult beetle fecal matter after it has been partially digested by bacteria. A scientific experiment was conducted to test these beetle’s pulling power in relation to their mass. The hypothesis stated,
Crops today are thriving, and farmers can owe it all to the pesticides they use. If no pesticides were used, then insects would destroy crops, feeding off of their leaves and produce until hardly anything is left. According to corncommentary.com, Without the use of pesticides and fungicides, most fruit and vegetable crops would suffer a 50-90 percent loss due to uncontrolled insects and disease organisms. Despite what most people believe, even organic growers use pesticides on their crops that have been approved for such organic growers. Even they know that the wrath of insects and other disease organisms would destroy their plants and their profit they would have made from those plants. Also, without things such as weed killers, people would have to till the soil around their crops by hand. On large scale farms, this would take a huge amount of people to complete a task like this. The weeds would have to be pulled up, by their roots to ensure they wouldn’t grow back rapidly. On top of that, the crop would have to be routinely checked for weeds, as they grow fast and of many. The amount of money it would take to pay all the workers, and how often they would need to be paid for their work, is not owned by any farmer. Pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are what help keep our crops protected and healthy. Without them, we would be in deep
To attract the insect, a mature Venus flytrap will grow a very long stalk so that the insect won’t get accidentally eaten. “At the top of the stalk, white flowers that secrete sweet-smelling chemicals, pollen and seeds that are 1mm long”. Venus flytraps has to be serval years old before it can get enough energy to make flowers and seeds. (http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4911676_venus-flytrap-reproduce.html
Blowflies can appear at the site of a decomposing corpse as quickly as ten minutes after the time of death. Once at the corpse, eggs are quickly deposited in natural orifices such as the eyes
Honey bees, or Apis mellifera, are social insects, despite what preconceptions there are about them. They are commonly divided into three divisions of class. The first is the worker bees. They are born from fertilized eggs and are the females that are not sexually developed. They are the ones that people usually associate with honey bees. Their main job is to search for food, and build and protect the hive from predators. They have one stinger that, when used, the worker will die. Next is the queen. Her job is to lay the eggs that will hatch into the new generation of bees. Queens also controls the hive and the activities within the hive by producing chemical pheromones the steers the behavior of the bees. She possesses a stinger and can sting and kill multiple times and not be killed herself. (Hoover, S, et al. 2003) In most hives, only one queen is present and if that queen dies, the workers will create a new queen by feeding one of the workers with a special diet called “royal jelly.” This allows the sterile worker to develop into a fertile queen. The last class division i...
Schwalbe, F. H. (1953). Of Bugs and Bombs. Retrieved 05 21, 2014, from University of Missouri, St Louis: http://www.umsl.edu/~thomaskp/schwab.htm
...hy, disgusting insects. If the villagers knew what the small, disaster-riddled pests were capable of doing, then they would fear the swarm’s return instead of praising and rejoicing it.
The life cycle starts as larva or caterpillar. First, the monarch lays the eggs on the milkweed plants. Next, the egg hatch into a caterpillar. The caterpillar then eats the milkweed plants until they are large enough to pupate (Emmel, 1999). Then, the caterpillar attaches a pad of silk to a stem of a milkweed plant so it can hang while it transform into a butterfly. Next, the caterpillar sheds it larval skin to reveal the chrysalis inside (Emmel, 1999). After it shed its skin, the pupa hardens and the chrysalis earns it name by glowing in the sun. As the pupa stage comes to an end, the butterfly can be seen through its pupa shell. The monarch emerges by splitting the pupa along the length of it proboscis (Emmel, 1999). First the legs emerge. Then the fluid fill body pumps its fluid into the veins of the wings while the body shrinks to normal size. Finally, the butterfly hangs from the pupa about two hours while the wings dry (Emmel, 1999).
Merchant, M. Insects in the City. Texas A&M Agrlife, 14 Aug. 2012. Web. 10 Nov. 2013.
There are nearly one million species of insects known. Insects are defined by having six legs and a body divided into three segments: head, thorax, and abdomen. Chitin is an organic material that makes up an insects exoskeleton. There are three life cycles of insects, ametabolous or incomplete and paurometabolous or gradual, and homotabolous or complete metamorphosis. These life cycles are important in the aging of insects for aiding in legal investigations, (Houck and Siegel. Entomology).
where beetles found only in the eastern United States. They also found the back leg of a
Yao, I. and S. Akimoto. 2001. Ant attendance changes the sugar composition of the honeydew of the drepanosiphid aphid Tuberculatus quercicola. Oecologia 128:36-43.
So overall, Agriculture is playing a very important role in changing the lifestyle of different people. Agriculture might have made everything easy for us but it still has its cons. We see the effects of agriculture and how it affects the lives of other species and the environment.
Insect, small, air-breathing animal characterized by a segmented body with three main parts—head, thorax, and abdomen. In their adult forms, insects typically have three pairs of legs, one pair of antennae, and in most instances, two pairs of wings. Insects rank among the most successful animals on Earth. About one million species of insects have been identified so far, which is about half of all the animals known to science. That is why for every pound of human on the earth there are 10 pounds of insects. So that is why there are many reasons why insects are so successful, their exoskeleton, their size, their body function, the way they reproduce, and their development of metamorphosis.