Portal:Insects

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The Insects Portal

A western honey bee on a honeycomb created inside of a wooden beehive
A bull ant showing the powerful mandibles and the relatively large compound eyes that provide excellent vision

Insects (from Latin insectum) are hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body (head, thorax and abdomen), three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, and a pair of antennae. Insects are the most diverse group of animals, with more than a million described species; they represent more than half of all animal species. (Full article...)

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Mosquitoes, the Culicidae, are a family of small flies consisting of 3,600 species. The word mosquito (formed by mosca and diminutive -ito) is Spanish and Portuguese for little fly. Mosquitoes have a slender segmented body, one pair of wings, three pairs of long hair-like legs, and specialized, highly elongated, piercing-sucking mouthparts. All mosquitoes drink nectar from flowers; females of some species have in addition adapted to drink blood. Evolutionary biologists view mosquitoes as micropredators, small animals that parasitise larger ones by drinking their blood without immediately killing them. Medical parasitologists view mosquitoes instead as vectors of disease, carrying protozoan parasites or bacterial or viral pathogens from one host to another.

The mosquito life cycle consists of four stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. Eggs are laid on the water surface; they hatch into motile larvae that feed on aquatic algae and organic material. These larvae are important food sources for many freshwater animals, such as dragonfly nymphs, many fish, and some birds. Adult females of many species have mouthparts adapted to pierce the skin of a host and feed on blood of a wide range of vertebrate hosts, and some invertebrates, primarily other arthropods. Some species only produce eggs after a blood meal. (Full article...)
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The following are images from various insect-related articles on Wikipedia.

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Credit: Chrumps

The rose chafer Cetonia aurata (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) is a beetle, 20 mm (¾ in) long, that has metallic green coloration.

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Here are some tasks awaiting attention:
  • Article requests : There are thousands of family-level through species-level articles that have yet to be started.
  • Categorization : Figure out what categories to add to each article so that others can find them more easily. Also use the {{WikiProject Insects}} template to classify the status of any articles related to insect taxa.
  • Infobox : Add or update a {{Taxobox}}: Add more information like species authors or create a completely new taxobox for an entomology article that needs one.
  • Photo : Many entomology–related articles would be substantially better with the addition of one or more photographs. Feel free to take your own and upload them, or find ones with the appropriate licenses and upload them here.

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