1. Insects Introduction into what insects are, their diversity and behaviour

2. Praying mantid (Paratenodera ardifolia) Satoshi Kuribayashi (Lennart-Nilsson-Preis 2006)

3. Japanese tiger beetle (Cicindela japonica) Photo by Satoshi Kuribayashi

4. Japanese giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) Photo by Satoshi Kuribayashi

5. Rhinoceros beetles (Allomyrina dichotoma) Photo by Satoshi Kuribayashi

6. Beetle Apriona japonica Photos by Satoshi Kuribayashi

7. Locusta migratoria Photo by Satoshi Kuribayashi

8. Ant worker Messor aciculatum carries flower bud to the nest Photo by Satoshi Kuribayashi

9. Insect bauplan headabdomen thorax Adult insects have 3 major body regions, six legs (on pair on each segment of the thorax), one pair of antennae and usually two pair of wings as adults (attached to last two segments of thorax).

10. Some characteristics of insects Invertebrate – exoskeleton Segmented body Dorsal heart Largely terrestrial Metamorphosis

11. Insects have compound eyes Eye of the lesser housefly Polarisation vision UV sensitivity

12. The insect nervous system brain ventral nerve chord organised into ganglia (local nervous centres – one per segment)

13. Insect breathing Insects have no lungs! Have a network of air tunnels (tracheae) Openings to outside are called spiracles

14. Insects and others

15. Insect orders

16. Social insects Most are hymenoptera, e.g. ants, wasps and bees (but there are also 10s of thousands of solitary species among the bees and wasps)

17. Consider this: Social insects, had “invented” division of labour, agriculture, castes, slavery, territorial wars, consensus building, “cities” with fantastic architecture and a symbolic “language” - 10s of millions of years before there were humans.

18. Slave making ants Ants of the Polyergus samurai species pulling out larvae and pupae of the Formica japonica species from the entrance of the nest they have raided.

19. “Agriculture” in ants Leafcutter ants collect leaves to feed fungi in their nest

20. Division of labour Age polyethism in honeybees

21. Different morphologies for different specialists Worker ant (left) of the species Pheidole nodus species feeding a soldier of the same species (right)

22. Termite skyscrapers

24. Karl von Frisch 1886-1982 (Nobel prize 1973)

25. How does the dance encode direction?

26. Consensus building Finding a suitable nest site: bee swarms From: Leadbeater & Chittka 2007 Current Biology

27. Consensus building in bees From Leadbeater & Chittka 2007

28. How can we measure the adaptive benefits of communication? The bee dance language as a model

29. Jamming the information content of the waggle dance

30. oriented dance disoriented dance From Dornhaus & Chittka 2004 Behav Ecol Sociobiol

31. Measuring foraging success 12,035 kg Daily weight changes of a beehive can be measured on a scale - this reflects mostly nectar intake

32. Temperate habitat (Central European)

33. Temperate habitat (Mediterranean)

34. Tropical habitat (India) - days of high nectar intake are missing without location communication

35. temperate

36. tropical

37. Spatial aggregation in tropical and temperate habitats Tropics Temperate

38. The honeybees originated in tropical Asia