Inside An Insect You’ll Find A Heart And Blood
But they’re so different you might not recognise them
Squish that bug
Surely you must have squished a bug at some time or another. The regular six-legged, segmented creepy-crawly kind such as an aphid, beetle, ant or moth.
They splat gruesomely, you might even think they splat satisfyingly if the bug was after your dinner, sucking your rose stems or munching its way through one of your sweaters.
And the splat they leave behind is usually a yellowish goop.
Incidentally, if you do see red when you squash a house fly or fruit fly, the colour is due to the red pigment from their ruined eyes, leaking out to stain their otherwise yellow blood.
Bugs’ blood
Insect blood is called haemolymph [US: hemolymph], a 19th century compound word with mixed Greek and Latin origin: haîma meaning blood and lympha meaning water nymph.
Haemolymph is different to our blood. For a start, it lacks the red colouring from the haemoglobin [US: hemoglobin] that serves to carry oxygen around our bodies.
Carrying oxygen is not one of the functions of haemolymph. It does not need to because instead, little holes called spiracles perforate the…
