From Silk Moths to Fruit Flies, These Five Insects Have Changed the World

If you were asked to select five insects that have most profoundly altered humanity since Homo sapiens first fashioned tools and harnessed fire, which insects would you choose?

With 1.1 million described species and ten quintillion individual insects hopping, buzzing, burrowing and swimming about, this could seem like a daunting exercise. Is your first impulse to choose insects known to carry disease or in some other way cause us harm? The rat flea initiated the Black Death that slashed the world’s population by a third. Mosquito-borne malaria kills well over half a million people a year and has altered the trajectory of wars and the building of vital infrastructure, such as the Panama Canal. The body louse, as vector of epidemic typhus, helped ruin Napoleon’s march on Moscow. There are crop destroyers, kitchen invaders, and insects that defend themselves with an unpleasant sting.

Though the species of insects implicated in these unhappy human interactions are not to be dismissed, in the grand scheme of biodiversity, they represent tiny twigs on the insect tree of life that pale in comparison to the remaining bastion of hexapod marvels that positively impact our lives, through ecosystem services (like pollination and decomposition) or in shaping our cultures.

Insects affect how we dress, what we eat, where we travel, and how we perceive the world. Insects are the subject of endless acts of biomimicry, inspiring engineers and architects, fashion designers and artists. Whether you choose to acknowledge or embrace insects, or recoil at their presence, they are your neighbors and your intimate companions, and their presence permeates your life in profound and positive ways. Insects outnumber, outweigh and predate us. They fill countless niches, feed others, and perform feats of wonder and beauty. Without insects, not only would we lose explicit and hidden facets that enrich our cultures, but the fabric of the natural world would unravel, leaving our cultural heritage—and us—a mere footnote in Earth’s history.

Let us consider five insect allies.

Domestic silk moth (Bombyx mori)

Legend tells us that the Chinese empress Leizu founded the cultivation of silk from caterpillars over 5,000 years ago, after a silkworm moth cocoon plummeted into her steaming teacup, unraveling into a single lustrous fiber. Silk was so valuable that it was a staple of the Silk Road, an ancient network of trade routes that transformed nations’ economies, spreading innovations, language, religion and material goods across vast expanses of the world. Upon penalty of death or exile, sericulture (the practice of cultivating silkworms to produce silk) was kept a state secret within China until insects were smuggled out and a shift of powers ensued. Japan would not have become a rising economic and military power without its silk exports. Silk is prized for its biocompatibility, high tensile strength, elasticity, lightness and breathability, and for its sensual, smooth texture and shimmer. Such attributes have attracted engineers wishing to devise synthetic imitations to advance tissue engineering, drug delivery systems, surgical sutures, biodegradable packaging and biosensors. Silk permeates art museums and the fashion industry. It has held our fascination and inspired our greed for so long that our domestication of silkworm moths has left them utterly reliant on us. Starting with a cocoon in a teacup, Bombyx mori is a moth that can no longer fly.

Western honey bee (Apis mellifera)

At a site now known as Barranco Gómez in eastern Spain, an artist depicted a sophisticated robbery using ocher on a cave wall. The scene takes place 7,500 years ago and shows an individual scaling a rope ladder tied into loops precariously propped against a cliff face. The thief steals two of the most valuable commodities of his time: wax and honey.

A honey bee secretes wax from her abdomen and masticates it into the architectural marvel that is her lightweight yet durable honeycomb, and she converts nectar from flowers into energy-rich honey. For humans, the entire comb is a bounty of sustenance and utility. Beeswax has been made into candles, cosmetics, coatings to prevent food from spoiling, medicinals and adhesives, and been used as the primary medium for encaustic painting. Some of the world’s great artworks have been forged using beeswax in the lost-wax process. Honey transcends its sweetness and has healed injuries and preserved bodies. Robbing honey bee nests and supplementing our diets with their energy-rich contents may have given our ancestors an edge that allowed us to transition from bee robbing to beekeeping.

Cochineal (Dactylopius coccus)

The source for the perfect red was carefully bred for millennia by the Aztecs and the Maya until the Spanish conquistadors exported the pigment by the ton to Europe. The trans-Atlantic recipients were bedazzled by its rich, evocative hue. Was it created by a worm, a berry, a worm-berry? Long would it remain a mystery until the French botanist Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville hoodwinked authorities by sneaking plants containing the treasure out of Mexico. His adventure-filled obsession culminated in a heist of the organism responsible for changing the world’s source of red. Historically used to adorn the European aristocracy and nobility, Catholic clergy and British “redcoats,” the scarlet dye is produced by a true bug—an insect with a piercing, sucking beak from hatchling nymph through adulthood. The cochineal bug, now used to color foods, drinks and cosmetics, is an organic answer to the hue most associated with danger, with temper, with sexuality, and with love.

Lac insect (Kerria lacca)

How many apples and candies have you eaten, floors have you stepped on, pieces of furniture have you shared a room with, or works of art have you admired that are coated with the protective, shiny layer of bug secretions? Cochineal bugs exude a white, waxy protective fluff over their bodies, but lac insects produce a hard encasement under which they can safely feed on the fluids of a plant. That is, until enterprising humans collect sticks containing lac, process it into flakes, then into a fluid. Shellac has historically been used to coat the surface of almost everything around you, including you (hair sprays, nail and shoe polishes, clothing dyes). The only commercial resin of animal origin, shellac is another example of an insect product that can be ubiquitous but about which we are oblivious. If these bug secretions escape our awareness, what other insect products are hidden in plain sight?

I’ve biased our sample to those exploited for their products: a caterpillar’s thread, honey and wax, the perfect red, and shellac. Let’s close with a speck of an insect that has taught us more about ourselves than any other organism on the planet.

Common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster)

Blasting off from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in 1946 was the first animal to experience the unprecedented hazards of space travel. Who was this (involuntary) heroic astronaut? Not a monkey or a dog, and certainly not a human. Fruit flies—those ever-present insects whirling around your kitchen fruits—became our irradiated, space-traveling forebears. Aside from serving as test subjects and leaders in space, fruit flies have become the go-to model organism for studying and navigating genetics. We share roughly 60 percent of our DNA with these flies, offering insights into disease prevention and the mechanics of evolution. Understanding a fly’s blueprint for heritability and how their brains are wired (all 139,255 neurons and their 54.5 million synapses) is a path to better understanding the natural world, including ourselves. Changes are afoot, and insects are providing a map to our possible futures.

Barrett Klein | READ MORE

Barrett Klein studied entomology at Cornell University and the University of Arizona, fabricated natural history exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, worked with honey bees for his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, and spearheaded the Pupating Lab at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse. He celebrates biodiversity and the intersection of science and art, and believes fully that embracing the beauty of insects can transform our lives and our world.