If you think of alien worlds, you probably look outwards to our galaxy and beyond. Yet there are alien worlds right under our noses – normally unseen, yet as strange as any we might find in deep space.

Insects and their relatives parted company with us and our vertebrate kin way back at the start of the Cambrian Period more than half a billion years ago, and so now the hidden lives of insects could not be more different from our own. On top of that, insects exist in bewildering diversity.

We don’t know exactly how many species of insect inhabit the planet. We’ve described about one million species, ...

 

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