EDUCATION | INSECTS
How to Define the Creepy-Crawlies
Your guide to the orders of the insect world
It was 11 in the morning and we had just gotten into the woods, crumpled research permit in hand. Me and my partner in crime, er, research, Cassie, were finally putting our plans to work collecting insects in the Pisgah National Forest. It was going to be a hot, sweaty, and buggy summer.
You see, I had become obsessed with insects after a trip to the Peruvian Amazon, where the bugs are everywhere: under every leaf, under every rock, in every shack, food hall, and crevice.
When I had gotten my feet back onto American soil, I wanted to learn more about our distant, 6-legged cousins. So I did that. I took a nose-dive into encyclopedias specifically about insects. While preparing for my research, I had come across more information than I could read. But there was one thing that kept popping up: insect orders.
Integral to the study of insects, or entomology, is that these 6-legged creatures are are divided up into groups that are called orders. Technically, these are based on evolutionary differences. Here is a great resource about that. In the field, orders are usually determined by physical traits like wing type or what adult mouthpart looks like.
