Insects, features and articles | Educational Science

Sep 20, 2018

Praying Mantis That Catches Fish Is a Guppy's Worst Nightmare

With their folded, spiky arms and large-eyed, triangular faces, praying mantises are instantly recognizable, and are well-known for their predatory prowess. But while mantises typically prey on insects, one opportunistic individual in India has developed a taste for fish. For the first time, scientists observed a praying mantis hunting guppies,...

Nov 5, 2019

Thousands of Ants Trapped in Polish Nuclear Bunker Turn to Cannibalism to Survive

In an abandoned nuclear bunker in western Poland, hundreds of thousands of worker ants that fell inside and were cut off from the main colony survived for years by eating the bodies of their dead. When researchers visited the bunker in 2016, they described a community of nearly a million...

May 20, 2020

High-speed video shows every second of a praying mantis's lethal strike

New slow-motion video shows how praying mantises snatch their prey with lightning-fast, deadly precision. Though these strikes are completed in microseconds, the long-armed predators calibrate their attacks even more quickly than that, adjusting to prey's speed and movements; praying mantises can even halt mistimed attacks mid-strike, scientists reported in a...

Jul 22, 2020

Strange, spiral bee combs look like fantastical crystal palaces. Now we know why.

In a world of bland hexagonal honeycombs, a small group of rebellious Australian bees has chosen to build spiral staircases. Meet the bees of the genus Tetragonula. These Aussie pollinators have no stingers, but make up for their defensive deficiencies by building mesmerizing fortresses of wax whose beauty has long...

Aug 6, 2020

Scythelike jaws of Cretaceous 'hell ant' clutch a baby cockroach in an amber tomb

Around 99 million years ago, a juvenile cockroach met a hellish fate. It was snapped up by the jaws of a Cretaceous hell ant, a fierce predator with long, curving mandibles that swept up toward the top of the ant's head. Just moments later, the ant and roach were trapped...

Jan 21, 2021

Scientists set up mantis 'gladiator matches' to see why some males keep their heads after sex

Female mantises are notorious for sexual cannibalism, gulping down males before, during or after it's time to tango. But unlike other male mantises, the male springbok mantis sometimes escapes cannibalism by violently wrestling and even seriously injuring the female during mating bouts. In a new study, males springboks that sparred...

Apr 16, 2021

To become queen, these ants shrink their brains and balloon their ovaries (then, they reverse it)

Even among ants, royal status is mostly an inherited affair. But for Indian jumping ants, a shot at wearing the crown is worth losing a bit of your brain for — especially as you'll always be able to grow it back later. Unlike other ant species, Indian jumping ants (Harpegnathos...

Apr 22, 2021

Dragon mantis females have a Y-shaped sex gland that moves like a tentacle and looks like a maggot

Female dragon mantises aren't subtle about letting males know that they're ready for sex. When it's mating time, females of this rare praying mantis species inflate a glistening, greenish gland that juts up and outward from the lower part of their abdomen. The structure has two branches, so it resembles...

May 28, 2021

These worker ants drag their queens to far-off bachelor pads to mate

Worker ants are known to take on many different job roles, from trash collectors to nurses that dress the wounds of injured comrades, to babysitters that care for their leader's young. But one Mediterranean ant species takes royal work to the extreme: The worker ants use their mandibles to haul...

Jun 30, 2021

Watch thousands of fire ants form living 'conveyor belts' to escape floods (Video)

It takes a lot of teamwork to survive floods, and fire ants cooperate in the tens of thousands to build rafts of their bodies to float until the water subsides. Now, a time-lapse video shows how these crafty insects also create living conveyor belts on these rafts to help the...

Nov 10, 2021

Bees 'shriek' when attacked by giant cousins of 'murder hornets'

When giant cousins of infamous murder hornets attack the hives of Asian honey bees, the bees produce a loud and frantic buzzing that resembles the panicked calls made by some types of birds and mammals if a predator is near. Giant hornets (Vespa soror) are a sister species to so-called...

Mar 22, 2022

Larva ant queen looks like an alien doll in trippy new microscope images

Every queen needs a crown. For the queen ant Monomorium triviale, that crown bursts and bubbles out of her head, back and abdomen while she's still a larva — leaving worker ants little confusion about who's the boss, even when the boss is a baby. M. triviale are amber-colored ants...

Mar 29, 2022

Invasive crazy ants are being annihilated by murder fungus. Good.

The days of invasive crazy ants — whose supercolonies can support millions upon millions of the fierce insects — may be numbered. That's because a deadly fungus that uses spring-loaded harpoonlike barbs to pierce the ants' gut cells is wiping out their colonies across the Southeastern United States. That's not...

Jul 21, 2022

Trap-jaw ants' lightning-fast bite should rip their heads apart. Here's why it doesn't.

Moving at speeds thousands of times faster than the blink of an eye, the spring-loaded jaws of a trap-jaw ant catch the insect's prey by surprise and can also launch the ant into the air if it aims its chompers at the ground. Now, scientists have revealed how the ant's...

Sep 1, 2022

These ant queens live 500% longer than workers. Now we know why.

How far would you go to increase your life span by 500%? One ant species engages in brutal colony-wide brawls to replace recently deceased queens — and the victor not only gains the throne, but also gets a dramatic boost to their longevity. Upon the death of a queen, Indian...