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The "Spanish fly", Lytta vesicatoria, has been considered to have medicinal, aphrodisiac, and other properties. Human interactions with insects include both a wide variety of uses, whether practical such as for food, textiles, and dyestuffs, or symbolic, as in art, music, and literature, and negative interactions including damage to crops and extensive efforts to control insect pests.
The arthropods are a phylum of animals with jointed legs; they include the insects, arachnids such as spiders, myriapods, and crustaceans. [1] Insects play many roles in culture including their direct use as food, [2] in medicine, [3] for dyestuffs, [4] and in science, where the common fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster serves as a model organism for work in genetics and developmental biology.
Using insects (and spiders) to treat various maladies and injuries has a long tradition and, having stood the test of time, can be effective and provide results. However, sometimes folk-medicinal "logic" was based on the Doctrine of Signatures ("let likes be cured by likes") and had, if any at all, little more than a psychological effect.
The discipline of medical entomology, or public health entomology, and also veterinary entomology is focused upon insects and arthropods that impact human health. Veterinary entomology is included in this category, because many animal diseases can "jump species" and become a human health threat, for example, bovine encephalitis.
Insects that feed on or parasitise other insects are beneficial to humans if they thereby reduce damage to agriculture and human structures. For example, aphids feed on crops, causing economic loss, but ladybugs feed on aphids, and can be used to control them. Insects account for the vast majority of insect consumption. [173] [174] [175]
Within rural communities still practicing traditional diets, grasshoppers and mopane worms are considered vital in their subsistence economy and the most important insects for nutrition. [2] The amount of caught insects per time spent trapping varies, depending on the level of rainfall predominately, but also different environmental conditions. [2]
Encouraging beneficial insects, by providing suitable living conditions, is a pest control strategy, often used in organic farming, organic gardening or integrated pest management. Companies specializing in biological pest control sell many types of beneficial insects, particularly for use in enclosed areas, like greenhouses .
The eggs, larvae, pupae, and adults of certain insects have been eaten by humans from prehistoric times to the present day. [5] Around 3,000 ethnic groups practice entomophagy. [6] Human insect-eating is common to cultures in most parts of the world, including Central and South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Eighty percent ...