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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.
There are many insects (and other arthropods) that affect human health. These arthropods include Diptera, Hemiptera, Phthiraptera, and Siphonaptera. They can parasitize, bite, sting, cause allergic reactions, and/or vector disease to humans. It can be impossible to know the full impact that insects and other arthropods have on human health.
Insects are considered pests for a variety of reasons, including direct damage by feeding on crop plants in the field or by infesting stored products, indirect damage by spreading viral diseases of crop plants (especially by sucking insects such as leafhoppers), spreading disease among humans and livestock, and annoyance to humans. Examples of ...
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.
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 .
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]
An organism bearing parts that resemble human body parts, animals, or other objects, was thought to have useful relevance to those parts, animals or objects. So, for example, the femurs of grasshoppers, which were said to resemble the human liver, were used to treat liver ailments by the indigenous peoples of Mexico. [ 2 ]
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 ...