Insects and spiders outnumber us past counting, and they are stranger than their reputation. Here are the ladybugs that saved California's orange groves, a trapdoor spider watched for forty-three years, desert ants that measure the way home in footsteps, a cape woven from a million spiders, and a few famous records that fell apart once somebody checked them.
Every tile in a Insects and Spiders game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Insects
nine stories
1The moth that can no longer fly
On the tile: Silkworm5,000 years ago
The silk moth, Bombyx mori, is the only completely domesticated insect, and it has paid for the arrangement. Over about five thousand years of selection from the wild silkworm Bombyx mandarina, the adult lost the ability to fly. A 2025 study found the whole flight system weakened. Nearly two thirds of domestic adults emerged with soft or misshapen wings, against about fifteen percent of wild ones, and the flight muscles were loosely arranged and built from smaller cells, driving a slower wingbeat. The species is believed to no longer exist in the wild.
The scarlet of a cardinal's robe and the coat of a British officer came out of an insect. Cochineal, a scale insect farmed on cactus, was produced almost entirely in Oaxaca by Indigenous growers, and it became Mexico's second most valuable export after silver. By the 17th century it was traded as far as India. Spain controlled the supply and kept the true source a guarded secret, and European naturalists did not establish that the dye came from an insect until the 18th century.
Shellac begins as a secretion from the lac insect, which encrusts the twigs of trees in India in a hard resin. Scraped, washed and dissolved, it becomes a glossy finish on furniture, a glaze on candy and, mixed with powdered rock, the heavy black discs that turned at 78 revolutions per minute. At the height of the record business in the 1930s, as much as forty percent of the world's shellac was going into music.
Screwworm flies lay their eggs in the wounds of livestock, and the larvae feed in the wound. Edward Knipling and Raymond Bushland proposed an odd cure: flood the area with males that cannot father anything. Flies were reared by the million, sterilized with radiation and released, so wild females laid eggs that never hatched. In 1954 the method cleared the screwworm from Curacao, a 176-square-mile island off Venezuela, in seven weeks. The two men shared the World Food Prize in 1992.
By the 1890s researchers suspected that malaria traveled inside blood-feeding mosquitoes, but nobody had shown it. Ronald Ross, a doctor in the Indian Medical Service working at Secunderabad, let mosquitoes feed on infected patients and then dissected them one after another. In 1897 he found the malaria parasite in the stomach of one particular kind of mosquito. He worked out the rest of the cycle in birds, and in 1902 he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
6Antarctica's largest land animal is a wingless fly
On the tile: Polar Midge
Antarctica has just two native insects, and the wingless one is the continent's largest full-time land resident: Belgica antarctica, a midge two to six millimeters long. Having no wings keeps the wind from carrying it somewhere worse, and it survives temperatures as low as five degrees Fahrenheit. The larvae take two full years to develop, frozen for much of that, and the adults live seven to ten days, crawling over rock and moss to mate. Its genome is the smallest ever sequenced in an insect.
The golden buprestid lays its eggs in conifers, and the larva spends two to four years tunneling before it emerges as a green-and-copper adult. If the tree is felled and milled first, the larva can end up sealed inside dry lumber, living very slowly on very poor food. Beetles have chewed their way out of paneling, furniture and cutting boards twenty or thirty years after the wood went in. The known record for the family is fifty-one years.
Periodical cicadas spend nearly their whole lives underground as nymphs, drinking fluid from tree roots, then climb out together for a few deafening weeks. There are seven species: four on a thirteen-year cycle and three on a seventeen-year cycle. Both numbers are prime, which has produced a favorite explanation about dodging predators. Researchers at the University of Connecticut point out the catch. Between one and twenty years, prime numbers are thick on the ground anyway.
9The locust that swarmed by the trillions, then went
On the tile: Locust1870s-1902
In the mid-1870s a swarm of Rocky Mountain locusts crossed Nebraska. A physician named Albert Child timed how long it took to pass and worked out that it covered about 198,000 square miles, more ground than California. Estimates of the insects in it run to trillions. Then the species collapsed. Farmers plowed the river valleys where it laid its eggs, and the last living specimens were collected in 1902. A creature that once darkened the sky is gone.
In Madagascar, biologists found orb webs strung above water on single silk lines, 10 to 14 meters across one midsized river and reaching 25 meters over a lake. The spider was new to science, and they named it Caerostris darwini. A 2010 study measured orbs of up to 2.8 square meters, among the largest known, and put the average toughness of its dragline silk at 350 megajoules per cubic meter, more than twice that of any silk described before it.
In 1974 the arachnologist Barbara York Main marked a young trapdoor spider in a reserve in Western Australia and gave her a number: 16. Trapdoor spiders keep one burrow for life, so Main could check on the same animal year after year for decades. Number 16 was still there in 2016, at least 43 years old and the oldest spider on record. Age did not kill her. A parasitic wasp pierced the lid of her burrow.
The diving bell spider lives underwater in European ponds. It spins a dome of silk among the plants, then ferries air down from the surface, trapped in the hairs on its abdomen, until the dome is a silver bubble. Roger Seymour and Stefan Hetz showed in 2011 that the bubble works as a gill: as the spider uses the oxygen, more diffuses in from the water. A resting spider can stay down for more than a day.
The net-casting spider hangs head down, holding a small woolly rectangle of silk stretched between its front feet, and drops it over anything that walks underneath. Its night eyes are enormous. In 2020 researchers at Cornell found that it hunts by ear as well: sensors at the tips of its legs pick up the hum of a flying insect about six feet away, and the spider throws the net backward, over its own head, at prey it never saw.
Judith Miles, a high school student in Lexington, Massachusetts, wanted to know whether a spider could spin a web with no gravity to hang it from. NASA flew her experiment, Web Formation in Zero Gravity, on Skylab 3 in 1973. Two cross spiders, Arabella and Anita, went up in a box that recorded everything they did. Both built normal-looking webs, though the silk came out finer than it would have at home. Anita is now in the Smithsonian.
Golden orb weavers spin silk the color of brass. To gather enough of it, Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley put a large team to work in the highlands of Madagascar, collecting wild spiders, drawing the silk from them with revived nineteenth-century tools, and releasing them again. More than a million females were silked over three years. The result was a shawl and a cape, shown at London's Victoria and Albert Museum in 2012. Nothing was dyed. The gold is the silk's own color.
Portia is a jumping spider that hunts other spiders, and it plans. Fiona Cross and Robert Jackson stood one on a tower set in a pan of water, in sight of prey, and gave it two ways to go: a short causeway straight across, or a longer path that circled around. The spider studied the scene before it moved, took the causeway when there was one, and chose the roundabout route when there was not. The work was done at a field station in Kenya.
The Sydney funnel-web is one of the few spiders known to have killed people. Thirteen deaths from funnel-web bites are on record, and every one was caused by a male, which leaves the burrow in the warm months to look for females and takes cover at dawn wherever it can, sometimes in a shoe left outdoors. Struan Sutherland and his team at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories brought an antivenom into clinical use in 1981. The Australian Museum records no deaths since.
Everyone has heard that daddy longlegs carry the deadliest venom of any spider but have fangs too short to use it. The Burke Museum calls it an urban legend with no basis in fact whatever. Half the trouble is the name. In much of the country it means a harvestman, which is not a spider and has no venom glands at all. Where it means the cellar spider, a study found the venom unusually weak in its effect on insects.
A honeybee that finds nectar comes home and dances a figure eight on the comb. Karl von Frisch spent decades marking bees with paint and training them to feeders before he could read it. The angle of the waggling run matches the angle the bee flew relative to the sun, and the speed of the dance tracks how far away the food is. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen.
Charles Henry Turner finished a doctorate in zoology at the University of Chicago in 1907, probably the first Black scientist to do so there, and then could not get a university post. He spent the rest of his career teaching at Sumner High School in St. Louis and running experiments with almost no equipment. In one, he trained moths to flap their wings at a whistle, which showed that insects hear and can tell pitch apart. He published more than seventy papers.
Desert ants cross featureless salt pans and then run a straight line back to a pinhole of a nest, which means they measure distance somehow. Matthias Wittlinger and colleagues tested the strangest possibility: that the ants count strides. They let ants walk out to a feeder, then glued pig bristles to their legs as stilts, or trimmed the legs into stumps, and released them. The stilt walkers overshot the nest. The stumpy ones stopped short.
A dung beetle that has shaped its ball rolls it away in a straight line, before a rival can take it. Marie Dacke and her colleagues found the beetles could hold that line on moonless nights, with nothing obvious to steer by. The whole band of the Milky Way, it turned out, was enough. When the researchers fitted the beetles with small cardboard caps that blocked their view of the sky, the straight lines wandered off course.
The leafcutter ants carrying green flags down a forest trail are not taking food home. They feed the clippings to a fungus in underground gardens, and the fungus is what they eat. Their ancestors took up farming about sixty-six million years ago, when the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs left a world where fungus thrived. As any farmer could have predicted, a specialist pest turned up: a mold called Escovopsis that attacks the crop. The ants carry antibiotic-producing bacteria on their bodies that kill the mold and spare the garden.
Army ants meeting a gap in the forest floor do not build a bridge. They become one: workers lock legs and hold still while the raiding column pours over their backs. A 2015 study found the structures are not fixed. A bridge starts at the sharp corner of a detour, then creeps toward a shortcut as new workers join, and it comes apart when the traffic over it thins. The colony stops well short of the shortest crossing, because an ant in the bridge is an ant not carrying food.
A giant hornet that finds a hive can bring back a raiding party, and colonies of European honeybees in Japan are often destroyed by them. Japanese honeybees answer with physics. Around five hundred workers pile onto the hornet in a tight ball and shiver their flight muscles. The core climbs to about 46 degrees Celsius, roughly 115 Fahrenheit, and the bees hold it there for half an hour. They can take that temperature. The hornet cannot.
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London gave bumblebees a clear path to a feeder and an optional side chamber full of little wooden balls. The bees went out of their way, over and over, to roll the balls, with no food in it for them and no nest-keeping involved. Younger bees rolled more than older ones, the way young mammals and birds play more. The 2022 paper was the first report of object play in an insect.
A bolas spider spins no web. It hangs from a thread holding a single line in one leg, a sticky drop at the end, and waits. The lure is chemical: the spider gives off a scent that copies the mating perfume of female moths. Male moths fly in, and the spider swings the drop at them. William Eberhard described the hunt in 1977, and a later study identified moth pheromone compounds in the air around hunting spiders.
The Dracula ant does not swing its jaws shut. It presses the tips of its mandibles together until they bend, loaded like a finger about to snap, then lets one slide off the other. High-speed video published in 2018 clocked the mandible tips at 90 meters per second, more than 200 miles an hour, with a complete strike over in as little as 23 millionths of a second. It is the fastest animal movement on record.
Micronecta scholtzi is a water boatman about 2.3 millimeters long, living on the bottom of European streams. The male sings by rubbing a ridged patch against a ridge on his abdomen, across an area roughly the width of a human hair. Researchers recorded a peak of 99.2 decibels, scaled to a meter away. Almost all of that sound is lost crossing from water into air, and people walking the bank can still hear it.
Stick insects are built to be overlooked, which makes the record holder faintly absurd. Guinness World Records lists a Phryganistria chinensis measuring 640 millimeters, just over 25 inches with its legs stretched out, bred at the Insect Museum of West China in Chengdu and made public in 2017. No insect on record is longer. Set it on a branch, and you would walk straight past it.
A wetapunga is a flightless, grasshopper-like insect that survives on Little Barrier Island, off New Zealand's North Island. In 2011 the entomologist Mark Moffett weighed a pregnant female at 71 grams, two and a half ounces, which Guinness World Records still lists as the heaviest verified weight for any insect. Adult Goliath beetles, its nearest rivals, run 40 to 50 grams; the heavier figures often quoted for them belong to their larvae. The species is endangered and protected by New Zealand law.
The atlas moth gets the posters, and it does have enormous wing area. But the widest span ever reported belongs to a drab gray moth of Central and South America called the white witch. Guinness lists a female found in 1934 at 30.8 centimeters, a little over a foot, with more recent specimens in the 28 to 30 centimeter range. The atlas moth's wingspan is about 30 centimeters. Spread is not the same thing as size.
To measure a beetle's strength, Rob Knell and Leigh Simmons glued a cotton thread to its wing cases, ran the thread over a pulley to a miniature bucket, and added water a drop at a time. The winner was a horned dung beetle, Onthophagus taurus, which kept its grip against a pull of 1,141 times its own weight. Scaled up to a person of 70 kilograms, that is 80 metric tons, about six double-decker buses.
The flea held this title for a long time. Then Malcolm Burrows of the University of Cambridge looked closely at froghoppers, and in 2003 the record changed hands. Guinness World Records lists the highest jump by an insect at 70 centimeters, by Philaenus spumarius, which grows to about a quarter of an inch. Taking off, it exerts a force 400 times its body weight, where a flea manages 135. It does all of that from a standing start, on a plant stem.
The globe skimmer is a small, ordinary-looking dragonfly with the longest migration known in any insect. Four or five generations a year carry a circuit between India and Africa that researchers put at 14,000 to 18,000 kilometers, part of it open water. Biologists at Rutgers found that globe skimmers sampled in Texas, eastern Canada, Japan, Korea, India and South America are genetically almost identical, which is what a species that never stops mixing looks like. They put a single insect's range at 4,400 miles or more.
Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer collected 65 published measurements of spider biomass per square meter across the world's biomes, then worked out how much a spider eats. Their 2017 estimate is that the planet's spiders kill between 400 and 800 million tons of prey a year, more than nine tenths of it insects and springtails. The same paper notes that people eat about 400 million tons of meat and fish a year. The spiders are quietly out-hunting us.