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What is a Insect?
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Insects have a head, thorax, and abdomen. The head bears the eyes, a pair of antennae, and variously modified mouthparts. The thorax (the part behind the head) has three pairs of legs, and often also has one or two pairs of wings. The abdomen usually has no appendages at all, except at the very tip where there might be an egg-laying tube, sensory tails, or claspers used to hold the opposite sex. They have an external, armour-like skeleton, which requires joints for movement, They do not have blood vessels for moving oxygen around like vertebrates do, and instead have a system of air tubes (tracheae) which usually open at special holes (spiracles) in the external skeleton. Insect "blood", called haemolymph, fills the body. The kind of wings an insect has allows for easier identification.
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Life Cycle of an Insect
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All winged insects begin as flightless young, through wingless immature stages before undergoing a metamorphosis to the fully winged adult stage. These stages occur with molts, in which the growing insect sheds its old external skeleton and grows a new one. With the exception of mayflies, which have two winged stages, fully winged insects never molt, and thus never grow.
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Insects in Algonquin Highlands Region
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It has been estimated that the Algonquin Highlands region supports over 7,000 species of insects. Plants depend on insects as pollinators, and entire ecosystems require insects in the food chain. Insects and parasitoids help keep pests numbers down, while some regulate plant density and influence the course of forest succession, and others have an effect on the lives of other wildlife, and finally others contribute to the decomposition of organisms.
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Insect Names
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| The scientific names of the insect orders often refer to the special types of wings which make the orders easy to recognize. Orders are divided into families (family names always have the suffix "idae"), families are divided into genera, and genera are divided into species. Species are always referred to with two words, the generic name (Capitalized and ltalicized) and the species name (italicized but never capitalized). |
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Further information on specific details/species is under development.
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