#bunnilena

Every single relationship i’ve been in has directly come from be being autistic and gay in the right places, so I don’t know shit when it comes to pickup lines; however, I do know a lot about bugs, so you get to hear about bugs!

The cladistics of class Insecta are absolutely fucking fascinating. To get started, insects fall into domain Eukaryota (organisms with a nucleus and organelles in their cells), kingdom Animalia (animals), phylum Arthrapoda (insects, crabs, spiders, and almost everything else with a chitinous exoskeleton), clade Mandibulata (arthropods with mandibles), clade Pancrustacea (crustaceans like crabs and barnacles as well as insects and whatnot), and subphylum Hexapoda (pancrustaceans with 6 legs).

Before I get too into things, Hexipoda is actually a super fascinating clade in and of itself. For starters, it's actually named quite well, as no other clade of animals really has 6 legs. You could make the argument that members of family Hexipopidae have 6 legs, but they’re crabs and their claws are actually a pair of specialized legs, meaning that they really have 8 legs when it looks like only 6. Granted, that does bring into question whether the word “leg” should be defined by morphology or by function, but that’s its own tangent.

Hexipoda contains only a few clades, being springtails, coneheads, 2-pronged bristletails, and insects. This actually is a great example of why modern biologists generally use cladistics (classification via tracing genetics and ancestry) over taxonomy (classification via observation of phenotypic similarities) as a system of organization. See, insects are usually taxonomically specified to be hexapods with wings, and the other hexapods are specified to not have wings; however, insects are actually split into to subclasses, being the pterygotes and the apterygotes (the actual classification is more complex, but this serves as a functional simplification). As the name implies, apterygotes do not have wings (ptera being from the greek root for wing), and consist of 3-pronged bristletails, jumping bristletails, silverfish, and firebats. All of these insects resemble the non-insect hexapods much more closely than they do other insects, but we know through cladistics that they do, indeed, fall under class Insecta.

Alright, now to actually get into the interesting classifications specifically under class Insecta. There are several orders that fall under Insecta that share the suffix -ptera (again meaning wing). Not only is this through-line is relatively unique amongst groups of clades, it also serves to describe many of the orders. For example, order Coleoptera consists of beetles and the prefix “coleo-“ means “shield”, so Coleoptera literally means shielded wings, which is a great description of the ways their hardened forewings (called elytra [yes, like in Minecraft]) shield their bodies. This remains true with many other orders of insects: Diptera (consisting of flies) means 2 wings, which describes how their small hindwings (called halteres) give them the appearance of only having 2 wings; Hymenoptera (consisting of bees, wasps, and ants) means membranous wings, which is a good description of their soft, thin wings; and Hemiptera (consisting of true bugs) means half wings and describes how true bugs’ forewings are partially hardened.

This naming pattern is not universal amongst insect orders; many don’t contain the suffix -ptera at all, and there are some orders like Siphonoptera (fleas) who’s name is a misnomer (fleas siphon with their mouthparts, not their wings). All in all though, the names of clades are often more descriptive and sometimes cutesy/silly than they come across as, and insects are, as always, a beautiful example of this quirk in the field of biology :3

I made several generalizations here that entomologists would probably find egregious, but imfodumping this shit is so fun. It becomes a combination of my special interests and writing and teaching and i really really hope you enjoyed reading my impassioned ramblings about bugs!

You have waaaaay more of us out here cheering you on than you could ever know (especially with many of us being plural :3), so you got this! That cleaning will be a piece of cake for someone as cool as you, just make sure to take breaks when your body says so, and rest with plenty of food and beverage when its all over.