Awesome Insects

Amateur naturalist Zefrank takes a few minutes to explore the strange and wonderful interactions of ant colonies, and how they work together to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts, along with some of the odd behaviors these insects exhibit.

Puppeteer Barnaby Dixon follows up his amazing character “Manu” with a dancing bug who glows in the dark. From his grippy bug hands, to his fluttering bug wings, to his dangly bug antennae, this little guy is a real charmer.

Kurzgesagt kicks off a multi-part lesson that explains how an organism’s size drastically affects its evolution. For instance, droplets of water could be lethal to insects. So some of them evolved to repel even tiny particles of water.

We hate trying to clean the sticky mess off of our windshields when bugs smack into them, so we can’t imagine how much time it took to scrub the bug debris off of this truck after it ran into a massive swarm of locusts on a road in Dagestan, Russia.

BBC Earth show The Hunt captured crisp macro footage of hotrod ants, as they make their way through the scorching 150ºF+ Namib desert, where it’s so hot that they would die if they stopped in the sun for even a few seconds. But the extreme heat isn’t their only foe.

Artist Xavier Segers aka “The Last Dodo” created these incredible insect images by precisely placing letters from various fonts. See if you can guess what font each one was made from, then head to the bottom of his Behance page for the answers.

One of the nastiest insects around. The tiger beetle has an appetite for just about any other kind of bug it can get its gnarly pincers on, from happy little ladybugs, to spiders it has no business messing with. Some of these critters can run nearly 6mph, so there’s no escape.

If you never saw The Bee Movie, here’s your opportunity to get it over with in just seven minutes. To make that happen, Avoid at All Costs sped up the movie a bit each time they say the word “bee.” It’s shockingly watchable, though it eventually runs off the rails.

This strange and ancient looking beetle has only been spotted a couple of times in the last two centuries, but National Geographic Young Explorer Mark Wong came across this insanely rare insect crawling through the jungle in Singapore.

Director Iqbal Ahmed’s fascinating and beautifully filmed short documentary introduces us to Steven Kutcher, a man full self-aware of his quirks, who has found a way to make a living – and art, through his love for insects.

Photographer David Weiller captured this eyepopping macro video of the Markia Hystrix, aka the Lichen Katydid, a spiky grasshopper as it blends in brilliantly with its similarly fibrous surroundings in Costa Rica.

Stargazer Pictures recently spotted a long line of caterpillars crossing their path in Perth, Australia, each dutifully following the fuzzy larvae leading the way. This time-lapse footage speeds things up a bit for our enjoyment.

Roboticist David Zarrouk’s and his team’s SAW (or “Single-Actuator Wave“) robot is both completely awesome, and serious nightmare fuel. This innovative robot can move on land or in water by wriggling its 3D-printed spine, and uses just a single motor to shimmy about.

BBC Earth Unplugged turns its macro lens on the house fly to show just how good they are at detecting impending doom, with their omnidirectional vision and fast reaction time. It’s fascinating footage, but we’re pretty sure they could have hit the fly if they tried harder.

If you’re creeped out by bugs, you might think twice, but trust us when we say that Oliver Mueller’s look at the insects of the New Forest of England is fascinating both from a scientific and cinematic perspective, and packed with simply amazing macro photography.

Kurzgesagt teaches us about the importance of honey bees to our world’s delicate ecosystem, and the science behind the phenomenon of colony collapse disorder. Next time you see a bee buzzing around you head, think about this video.