Field guides, deep-dive articles, videos, a podcast, and a growing glossary of terms.
A family of robust, hairy flies (Diptera: Brachycera) whose larvae are obligate endoparasites of mammals. Adults are non-feeding and short-lived; females deposit eggs or larvae on or near hosts, and first-instar larvae penetrate skin or enter body openings to develop in subcutaneous tissue (cutaneous myiasis) or internal organs (gastric, nasal, or other cavities). The family includes subfamilies Cuterebrinae (New World skin bots), Hypodermatinae (cattle grubs), Gasterophilinae (horse stomach bots), and Oestrinae (nasal bots of sheep and other mammals).
We've embedded content from YouTube here. As YouTube may collect personal data and track your viewing behaviour, we'll only load the video after you consent to their use of cookies and similar technologies as described in their privacy policy.
The most dangerous insects and arachnids are usually not the most cinematic ones. If you measure danger by disease burden, exposure, and medical importance instead of pure shock value, mosquitoes, ticks, kissing bugs, tsetse flies, sand flies, and black flies rise fast, while famous scary bugs like killer bees, giant hornets, camel spiders, and deathstalker-type arachnids need more context than hype.
Entomology feels ancient because people have always noticed insects, but the science itself took shape slowly. From Aristotle and Aldrovandi to Swammerdam, Merian, Linnaeus, Riley, and modern IPM, the history of entomology is really the story of how insects kept forcing biology to get more precise.
From the first fruit flies to Skylab spiders, ISS ants, and JAXA silkworm experiments, bugs have been part of space research for decades—not as a gimmick, but as useful test subjects for questions about radiation, behavior, development, and life in microgravity.
