Thousands of the world’s smallest insects would fit on this line.
Quiz question: what is the smallest insect in the world? Now the notes are highlighted!
It is a particle wedge called Kikiki huna. This insignificant bug is only 160 micrometers long, i.e. 0.16 millimeters large. Approximately hair thick.
It was found – somehow – twenty years ago on the island of Moloka in Hawaii, when scientists were looking at wedge spikes. The species name comes from two Hawaiian words, each meaning a small thing.
Wedges belong to parasitic nematodes. So they lay eggs on the eggs of other insects, and the caterpillar eats its host alive. This is not visible to the human eye, but it happens.
By behaving inappropriately in this way, particle wedges bully, among other things, icicles and eyelashes, which are also very small.
In fact, the smallest, albeit wingless, insect is Dicopomorpha echmepterygis, wedges he too. The smallest individual has been only 139 micrometers long.
There would be hundreds of them in a row in a column of a printed magazine in the space required by that species name. And because these insects are very short-lived, they will likely have time to die while a person learns to pronounce that species name.
The size range is such that these bugs are already smaller than some amoebae, which are thus unicellular organisms. In the meantime, nature has accommodated the entire body, wings and nervous system.
Daisy pictured is the bronze position of the small insects. Megaphragma mymaripenne is about 200 micrometers long. The image was taken with an electron microscope.
Russian insect researcher Alexei Polilov has taken a look at this wedge point. He has found in his research that the insect has only 253 brain cells.
That’s quite a bit when even a bee has about a million. So every cell is sure to be put to good use as the wedge-bellied thinks about the way life goes.
In the larval phase, the bug still has 7,400 nerve and brain cells, but the adult is stupider. Apparently, the brain would take up too much energy, so the insect does little.
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