Random Insect Generator

What the insect generator does

You want an insect. For a class, a drawing, a story, a quiz, a kid turning over rocks in the garden, or because you saw Hickory Horned Devil on the list and had to know.

This gives you one. Pull a batch and it ranges from the ant on your windowsill to a tarantula hawk to things that sound invented and are not.

What follows is a fact so large it is hard to take in. When you talk about animals, you are, statistically, almost always talking about insects, because they are not a corner of the animal kingdom. They are most of it.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. One for a subject, a handful to browse.
2. Press Generate. A fresh set every time.
3. Press Copy to take the set with you.

Most animals are insects

Here is the sentence that reorders your sense of life on this planet. More than half of all known animal species are insects.

Not a large share. More than half. Of every animal species that has ever been described and named, science, birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, spiders, worms, jellyfish, everything, over half are insects, and it is not close. There are around a million named insect species and the true number is thought to run to many millions more, most of them never yet described. Beetles alone, one order, outnumber all the vertebrates put together several times over.

There is a famous line about this. When a scientist was supposedly asked what a lifetime of studying nature had taught him about the mind of the creator, he is said to have replied that the creator had an inordinate fondness for beetles. Whether he really said it or not, and it is one of those drifting quotes, the fact underneath is solid. This is a planet of insects, and beetles most of all, and we are the unusual minority stomping around on top.

So when you pull a random animal from any generator on this site, remember that the honest, statistically representative animal is not the lion or the eagle. It is a small six-legged thing you have never heard of and would not notice. The mammals and birds we build our stories around are the rare exceptions. The rule is on this list.

By weight, too, they dominate in ways that are hard to picture. The total mass of ants alone rivals or exceeds the total mass of wild birds and wild mammals. A rainforest is not really a place with insects in it. It is a structure built and maintained and largely composed of them, with a few large animals moving through.

The skeleton is on the outside, and that is the whole story

Ask what makes an insect an insect and there is a real answer, and it explains almost everything else about them, including why there are so many and why none of them is large.

An insect wears its skeleton on the outside. Instead of bones on the inside with soft flesh around them, an insect is a hard shell on the outside with everything soft tucked within, like a suit of armour that is also the body. It is called an exoskeleton, and it is made largely of a tough material called chitin.

This one design choice drives everything.

It is why insects have to moult. A shell on the outside cannot grow, so to get bigger the insect must climb out of its old skeleton entirely, soft and vulnerable for a while, and harden a new larger one. Every insect on this list has done this several times, backing out of its own body like stepping out of a suit.

It is why they are small. An exoskeleton works beautifully at small sizes and fails at large ones, because armour that stays light on a beetle would become impossibly heavy on a dog-sized animal, and the breathing system insects use, air piped directly through tiny tubes rather than pumped by lungs and blood, only supplies a small body. There were giant insects once, dragonflies with hawk-sized wingspans, but only when the ancient air held far more oxygen. In today's air, the design tops out small, which is the only reason the animals on this list are not the size of the ones on the mammal list, and, frankly, the only reason we win.

And it is a large part of why there are so many. The exoskeleton is enormously adaptable, a hard modular kit that evolution can reshape into mouthparts for any food, wings, stings, drills, diggers and armour, endlessly, which is how one body plan radiated into more species than everything else combined.

So the armour explains the moulting, the small size, the diversity, and the sheer number. Nearly everything strange about an insect flows from the single fact that it is built inside out compared to you.

Why a spider is not on this list, and a bug is not what you think

Two words get used loosely here, and pinning them down is genuinely useful.

First, spider. A spider is not an insect and you will not find one on this list. Insects have six legs and three body sections. Spiders have eight legs and two, along with scorpions, ticks and mites, and they sit in a separate group, the arachnids, as distinct from insects as a cat is from a lizard. It is the most common mistake in the whole subject. Six legs, insect. Eight legs, not. That single count sorts almost everything.

Second, and more surprising, the word bug. In everyday speech a bug is any small creepy-crawly. In actual entomology, a bug is something much narrower and more specific. True bugs are one particular order of insects, defined by mouthparts built like a straw for piercing and sucking, and they include the stink bugs, assassin bugs, aphids, water striders and bed bugs on this list. A beetle is not a bug. A ladybug, despite the name, is a beetle, not a true bug. An ant is not a bug. A butterfly is not a bug.

So most of the things people call bugs are not bugs, which is a small delight once you know it. Next time someone calls a beetle a bug you are equipped to be quietly insufferable about it, and you would be correct.

You will also notice this list mixes broad groups with specific creatures. Beetles as a whole sits near a particular kind of tiger beetle, and Butterflies sits near individual butterfly species. That is because insects are so vast that a list has to zoom in and out, naming a giant category here and a single species there, the way a map of the world might mark a whole continent and a single city on the same sheet. Both are legitimate. There are simply too many insects to hold at one level of detail.

Where these come from

The insects here come from a list our team put together and checked by hand. Press the button and one is drawn out of it at random.

That is the whole thing, and it runs on your own device.

The quiet catastrophe

There is one more thing worth knowing about this list, and it is the serious one.

The insects are disappearing, and because they are small and unloved, almost nobody notices. Study after study in recent years has found steep declines in insect numbers across large parts of the world, in some places well over half the flying insect mass gone within a few decades. People who are old enough often describe it without needing a study. Drive across the countryside on a summer night and your windscreen used to be covered in them. Now, often, it is nearly clean. That change is real, and it is not good news.

Here is why it matters far more than the reputation of insects would suggest. Everything is standing on them. They pollinate a huge share of the crops people eat. They are the food that birds, fish, amphibians and small mammals depend on, so when insects fall, everything above them falls too. They recycle dung and dead things and keep soil alive. Remove the large charismatic animals and ecosystems suffer. Remove the insects and ecosystems collapse, because the insects are the layer holding the whole thing up.

So the least loved animals on this website turn out to be the ones the rest of life cannot do without. It is worth a moment of respect for the small six-legged thing the generator hands you, even the ones that bite, because a world with far fewer of them is a poorer and hungrier place, and we are quietly building it.

Questions people ask

Why isn't the spider on here?

Because a spider is not an insect, as covered above. It has eight legs and two body sections and belongs to the arachnids, alongside scorpions, ticks and mites. Insects have six legs and three body sections. It is the single most common error in the subject and the leg count settles it instantly. If it has eight legs, it does not belong on an insect list, however much it looks like it should.

How many insects are there?

Around a million species have been named and the real total is estimated in the millions, with most still undescribed, which is a genuinely staggering thing to sit with. It means that at any given moment, most of the animal species on Earth are insects we have not even catalogued yet. By sheer count of individuals the numbers stop being meaningful, running into the quintillions. This is their planet by the numbers, and we are the anomaly.

Are any insects actually useful to humans?

Enormously, and it is easy to forget under the annoyance. Bees and other insects pollinate a large fraction of the food crops people eat, and without them the supermarket would empty of a great deal more than honey. Silkworms make silk, insects underpin the food chains that produce the fish and birds we eat, and they clean up waste that would otherwise pile up. For every mosquito there are many species doing quiet, essential, unpaid work that the whole living world depends on.

Can I use this for a school project?

That is a lot of why it is here, and insects make unusually good projects precisely because they are overlooked. Pull one, then find out what it eats, how it develops and what it does for its ecosystem, and you will almost always land somewhere more interesting than another report on a large mammal. The decline story above is also a serious, real, current subject if you want a project with genuine stakes.

So what actually counts as a bug?

Strictly, a true bug is a member of one specific order of insects with piercing and sucking mouthparts, including stink bugs, aphids, bed bugs and water striders. Everything else people casually call a bug, beetles, ants, butterflies, is not one in the technical sense. In ordinary speech bug just means any small creepy-crawly and that is fine, but if you ever want to be precise, or pedantic, most bugs are not bugs, and now you know exactly why.

References

1. Stork, N. E. (2018). How many species of insects and other terrestrial arthropods are there on Earth? Annual Review of Entomology, 63, 31 to 45. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ento-020117-043348
2. Hallmann, C. A. et al. (2017). More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas. PLoS ONE, 12(10), e0185809. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185809
3. Bar-On, Y. M., Phillips, R. and Milo, R. (2018). The biomass distribution on Earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(25), 6506 to 6511. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1711842115