Insects & Other Invertebrates Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for a chemical signal released by an animal into the air or onto a surface that changes the behaviour of other members of its own species, such as an ant's trail marker, a bee alarm scent, or the airborne lure a female moth uses to draw a mate?

Question 2

What is the name for the programmed, hormone-controlled pause in development that many insects enter before hard conditions arrive, often as an egg or pupa, halting growth for months and not resuming even if warmth returns until an internal clock or a spell of cold has run its course?

Question 3

Which insect is an ordinary solitary grasshopper most of the time but, when crowding forces its young to jostle together, changes over a generation or two into a brightly coloured, restless, swarming form that gathers into clouds of billions and strips the land bare?

Question 4

Which scale insect, farmed on prickly-pear cactus in Mexico and Peru since before the Spanish conquest, is crushed for a brilliant crimson dye once shipped to Europe as a treasure second only to silver, and still colours foods, drinks and cosmetics under the name carmine?

Question 5

What is the name for the way a honey bee colony multiplies: the old queen and about half the workers pour out and settle in a hanging cluster on a branch, from which scout bees fly off to inspect possible new homes and dance for their favourites until the group agrees?

Question 6

What is the name for the strategy of advertising rather than hiding, in which an animal that is poisonous, foul-tasting or well-armed wears bold, high-contrast colours such as the black and yellow of a wasp or the orange of a monarch, so that predators learn to leave it alone?

Question 7

Which segmented worm with a sucker at each end moves by looping, and in the blood-feeding kinds slits the skin, floods the wound with a substance that stops it clotting, and drinks several times its own weight before dropping off?

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About Insects & Other Invertebrates

This quiz is about insects and their many-legged, soft-bodied, spineless kin on land and in fresh water: the orders and how to tell them apart, how an insect is built and how it grows, the social insects and their colonies, the spiders and their relatives, the centipedes and millipedes, the snails, slugs and worms, and the records, pests and conservation stories. One hundred questions in five packs, each describing a creature, a group, a body part, a life stage or a behaviour and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. Marine molluscs, crabs, jellyfish and starfish belong to the Fish & Sea Life quiz; this is a knowledge quiz, not a picture quiz.

The first pack is the insects most people can name: the honey bee, the monarch butterfly, the dragonfly, the ant, the housefly and the mosquito, the termite and the cockroach, the ladybird and the firefly, the praying mantis, the locust and the cicada, the flea, the silkworm moth, the stick insect, the weevil, the dung beetle, the aphid and the earwig.

The second pack is how an insect works: the exoskeleton and moulting, complete and incomplete metamorphosis, the pupa and the instar, the compound eye and the ocelli, the air-tube breathing system, the open blood system, the insect kidney, the antennae, pheromones, the egg-laying tube that became the sting, the balancing organs of flies, the wing-cases of beetles, the butterfly's coiled tongue, the breathing holes, winter dormancy and warning colours.

The third pack is social life: eusociality itself, the drone, the waggle dance, food-sharing, swarming, army ants, leafcutter ants, honeypot ants, weaver ants, the bullet ant, the fire ant and the Argentine ant, the paper wasp and the giant hornet, the fig wasp and the gall wasp, the parasitic ichneumon and the tarantula hawk, the bombardier beetle and the Africanized honey bee.

The fourth pack leaves the insects for their relatives: the spider, the scorpion, the tarantula, the black widow, the orb-weaver and the jumping spider, spider silk, the tick and the mite, the harvestman, the centipede and the millipede, the woodlouse, the earthworm and the leech, the garden snail and the slug, the velvet worm, the tardigrade and the springtail.

The fifth pack is records, pests, culture and conservation: the titan beetle and the giant weta, the atlas moth and the Hercules beetle, the desert locust, the boll weevil and the Colorado potato beetle, the varroa mite and colony collapse, silk, cochineal and shellac, the sacred scarab, the death's-head hawkmoth, the woolly bear, light pollution, pollination, biological control, the sterile-male method and the Wolbachia bacterium.

The wrong answers are always other creatures or terms of the same kind. About a quarter of the questions carry a neutral photograph of a dewy web, a meadow or fallen leaves, chosen because it names no species and so cannot point to any option. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.