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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.
Economic entomology is a field of entomology, which involves the study of insects that benefit or harm humans, domestic animals, and crops. Insects that pose disadvantages are considered pests . Some species can cause indirect damage by spreading diseases, and these are termed as disease vectors .
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.
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 ...
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]
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.
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]
Forensic entomology is a branch of forensic science that studies insects found on corpses or elsewhere around crime scenes. This includes studying the types of insects commonly found on cadavers, their life cycles, their presence in different environments, and how insect assemblages change with decomposition. [16]