The Characteristics of Insects

To the majority of human beings, insects are a source of disgust, fear, and apprehension. But insects are animals that play an important role in our world and there are literally millions of spieces of insect. They are a subset of arthropods, a category of animal that has a body split up into distinct segments, as well as an exoskeleton.

There are lots of animal that you might mistake for insects if you don't know the difference, but insects can be easily told apart by a few basic characteristics. One of the traits of insects is that they have three separate segments to their body. Those three segments are the head, the thorax, and the abdomen. The head is pretty much what you what expect, while the thorax is like a torso that connects to the head. And the abdomen connects to the thorax, and looks like the backside of the creature.


Another thing that sets insects apart from different creatures is their six jointed legs. The six legs are connected to the thorax in pairs. If you stumble upon a tiny insect-like creature that has legs attached to its abdomen, then it is something other than an insect. Another typical trait of insects is that they have antennae protruding from their head. I should point out that while most insects do indeed have antennae, there are a few species that don't. One more charcteristic is the presence of wings. There are a few spieces of insects that can not fly, but they will have wings at some time during their life cycle. One final characteristic is the insect's hard exoskeleton.

Using the above characteristics as a guage, it should be fairly simple to identify insects. The problem is that during certain times in an insect's life cycle it may not display all adult insect characteristics. Caterpillars, for instance, do no display wings or antennae, but when they grow into butterflies they will. So it is important to look at both an adult and a developing specimen.

Let's take a look at a couple of creatures that are commonly confused with insects. It is fairly common knowledge among adults that spiders are not insects but arachnids, as we can confirm by counting their number of legs. Spiders have eight legs, so right away we know that they can't be insects. Slugs and snails are also not insects, as we can see if we can't their legs: they don't have any! One more example is the centipede. Centipedes are not insects but rather chilopa. They don't possess a set number of limbs, instead having a single pair of legs per body segment. And centipedes can have many body segments.

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