Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
An insect uses its digestive system to extract nutrients and other substances from the food it consumes. [3]Most of this food is ingested in the form of macromolecules and other complex substances (such as proteins, polysaccharides, fats, and nucleic acids) which must be broken down by catabolic reactions into smaller molecules (i.e. amino acids, simple sugars, etc.) before being used by cells ...
Insect cooking oil, insect butter and fatty alcohols can be made from such insects as the superworm (Zophobas morio). [199] Insect species including the black soldier fly or the housefly in their maggot forms, and beetle larvae such as mealworms , can be processed and used as feed for farmed animals including chicken, fish and pigs. [ 200 ]
Far more serious are the effects on humans of diseases like malaria carried by blood-sucking insects. Other blood-sucking insects infect livestock with diseases that kill many animals and greatly reduce the usefulness of others. [162] Ticks can cause tick paralysis and several parasite-borne diseases in humans. [163]
Dyestuffs including carmine , [174] [175] shellac, [176] [177] and kermes [178] [179] have been made from the bodies of insects. Working animals including cattle and horses have been used for work and transport from the first days of agriculture. [180] Animals such as the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster serve a major role in science as ...
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 ]
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.
Female insects are able make eggs, receive and store sperm, manipulate sperm from different males, and lay eggs. Their reproductive systems are made up of a pair of ovaries, accessory glands, one or more spermathecae, and ducts connecting these parts. The ovaries make eggs and accessory glands produce the substances to help package and lay the ...