Humans or insects: who's doing better?

An impartial observer from another planet might soon deduce that it was insects, rather than human beings that constituted the most successful form of animal life on Planet Earth.

Just look at the facts:

There is only one species of human, but possibly as many as eight million insect species that have evolved to fit just about every habitable zone on the plant.

Humans have been around for no more than two million years, but the fossil record shows that insects were around hundreds of millions of years ago. Modern cockroaches, for example, have changed very little from their ancestors that lived 300 million years ago.

However, some species have undergone considerable change – fossilised dragonflies have been found with wingspans similar to that of a modern seagull.

Here are some other remarkable facts about insects:

Although there is a huge range of butterfly species, there are ten times as many species of moth.

The world’s smallest insect is the fairyfly, at 0.2 millimetres across – about the size of the dot on the i of “insect”!

Silkworms (which are not worms but insects) are no longer found in the wild but have been completely domesticated as producers of silk.

© John Welford