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Humans have interacted with the Hemiptera for millennia. Some species, including many aphids, are significant agricultural pests, damaging crops by sucking the sap. Others harm humans more directly as vectors of serious viral diseases. The bed bug is a persistent parasite of humans, and some kissing bugs can transmit Chagas disease.
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.
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]
Diptera is one of the major insect orders and of considerable ecological and human importance. Flies are major pollinators, second only to the bees and their Hymenopteran relatives. Flies may have been among the evolutionarily earliest pollinators responsible for early plant pollination .
A human's unique body odour indicates that the target is actually a human host rather than some other living warm-blooded animal (as the presence of CO 2 shows). Body odour, composed of volatile organic compounds emitted from the skin of humans, is the most important cue used by mosquitoes. [ 42 ]
Arthropoda is the largest animal phylum, with the estimates of the number of arthropod species varying from 1,170,000 to 5~10 million and accounting for over 80 percent of all known living animal species. [36] [37] One arthropod sub-group, the insects, includes more described species than any other taxonomic class. [38]
Pigeons intermingle with tourists in Venice. A synanthrope (from ancient Greek σύν sýn "together, with" and ἄνθρωπος ánthrōpos "man") is an organism that evolved to live near humans and benefit from human settlements and their environmental modifications (see also anthropophilia for animals who live close to humans as parasites).
Medical 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.