Awesome Insects

When you think about how small insects are, it’s pretty amazing that they can fly around when they’re being pelted with raindrops. The PBS series Be Smart explores the amazing biological adaptations that allow bugs to handle a downpour and not come crashing to the ground when the rain hits.

Artist Zak Miskry makes amazing metal sculptures of insects and animals from recycled electronics and scrap metal. In this video, he shows how he created a larger-than-life firefly that lights up like the real thing. It was a painstaking process to pick and place all the right parts, but the finished sculpture was worth the effort.

Author and nature lover Paul Rosolie has spent 20 years in the Amazon rainforest on a mission to help protect its ecosystem. But camping in the wilds of the rainforest isn’t glamorous or comfortable. Paul shows how gnarly things can get when a swarm of leafcutter ants descends on his campsite and starts nibbling on everything from his tent to his ear.

Are you ready for some new nightmare fuel? Ze Frank has got you covered with a video about some of the many creepy wasps that implant their eggs in the bodies or larvae of their victims. The babies then feast on their host’s insides until they grow up and pop out. Surprise, surprise!

While spiders might creep you out, most are harmless to humans and help eliminate nasty pests like wasps and hornets. In this fascinating video, an orb-weaver makes quick work of a wasp by capturing it in its web and then wrapping it up in silk in about a minute. It almost looks like the video has been sped up, but it’s in real-time.

This award-winning short film by Kristina Dutton and a team of scientists and animators gets us up close to the wings of butterflies and moths. The microscopic and macro images show off the varied patterns and colors that appear in their wings, demonstrating the incredible biodiversity within the order of insects which includes over 180,000 species.

“Ugh, I’m going to my room!” So goes the lighthearted narration in Deep Look’s video about how flies mature from maggots to the pesky insects we know. It’s a good thing the narrator is so comforting and fun to listen to, because seeing a fly up close and in high resolution is quite bizarre and unsettling.

There’s a real camera out there that’s the size of a grain of sand. But for this video, the guys from Corridor didn’t strap one of these technological marvels to a bee. Nope, they used a drone and their visual effects skills instead, giving us a fun bee’s-eye perspective on the world as the apian buzzes around. See how they made the clip in the Behind-the-scenes video.

Bees are an important part of our ecosystem, pollinating the plants that give us food and making their own delicious honey. Ze Frank explains how intelligent these insects are despite their tiny brains. They not only know how to make perfect hexagons for their hives, they can be trained to solve puzzles and simple math problems when motivated.

Director and animator Elizabeth Fijalkowski created this wonderfully off-kilter short film about an elderly entomologist who becomes obsessed with collecting an unusual moth that has eluded him for years. The creepy soundtrack by Daniel Carpenter and Foley work by Orb Community Arts help set the tone.

Inspired by Bernard Werber’s eponymous fantasy novel, Empire of the Ants is a photorealistic real-time strategy game. You play as 103,683rd, the heralded savior of their ant colony. Build and expand your anthill, conquer other territories, and befriend and fight other forest creatures. Coming to PS5 in 2024.

(Flashing lights) Jacob Weldon’s gruesome horror short film BUG has a slick, neon-lit style inspired by the 1980s. But there’s nothing glossy about what happens to its protagonist after she gets bitten on her arm by a pesky fly. It makes us wonder if the bug was related to Jeff Goldblum’s infamous Brundlefly.

When it comes to living creatures, everything starts small. This fascinating and creepy nature video from Adrian Kozakiewicz’s Insecthaus uses jump cuts to show how insects progress from eggs or larvae to their adult forms. Adrian also has no problem letting his menagerie of bugs crawl all over his face.

Insects are weird, so we’re not surprised by some of the strange things we learned about butterflies and moths in this video from Ze Frank. Lepidoptera are attractive prey for birds, reptiles, wasps, and other animals. To help survive against these threats, these insects have evolved defenses, including unpredictable flight patterns, toxins, and mimicry.

Despite their lack of wings, spiders can actually take flight. This video from the University of Bristol video explains a process called ballooning, in which spiders take advantage of static electrical charges and wind currents to carry silk – and their bodies – through the air.

Ants are well known for their ability to work together to build things and accomplish tasks for their colony. In this fascinating video from Horace Zeng, we see how hundreds of fire ants work in concert to pick up, move, and place pieces of glass gravel on a piece of sticky tape, resulting in a colorfully-paved road of sorts.