Insects & Other Invertebrates Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which large moth, marked with a pale skull-shaped patch on its back, can force air through its short trunk to make a loud squeak, and slips into bee hives to steal honey while giving off a scent that keeps the bees calm?

Question 2

Which wasp begins each colony afresh in spring when a lone mated female, which spent the winter in hiding, chews weathered wood into a grey pulp and shapes an open, stalked comb of hexagonal cells, later helped by her sterile daughters until the whole nest dies off in autumn?

Question 3

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 4

What is the name for fighting a pest by bringing in its natural enemies, a strategy whose textbook triumph was the Australian ladybird shipped to California in 1888 to save the citrus groves from cottony cushion scale within months?

Question 5

Which small wasp lays its eggs in the buds, leaves or twigs of plants, mostly oaks, releasing chemicals that make the plant grow a swollen, often intricately shaped lump around the grubs, feeding and sheltering them until they chew their way out?

Question 6

Which moth has been farmed for so many thousands of years that it can no longer fly or feed as an adult and no longer exists in the wild, its plump caterpillar spinning a cocoon from a single unbroken thread up to nine hundred metres long?

Question 7

Which orange-and-black butterfly of North America makes a migration that takes several short-lived generations to complete, the autumn generation flying up to four thousand kilometres to cluster in the same few Mexican fir groves its great-grandparents left?

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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.