Human interactions with insects
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Human interactions with insects include both a wide variety of uses, whether practical such as for food, textiles, and dyestuffs, or symbolic, as in art, music, and literature, and negative interactions including serious damage to crops and extensive efforts to eliminate insect pests.
Academically, the interaction of insects and society has been treated in part as cultural entomology, dealing mostly with "advanced" societies, and in part as ethnoentomology, dealing mostly with "primitive" societies, though the distinction is weak and not based on theory. Both academic disciplines explore the parallels, connections and influence of insects on human populations, and vice versa. They are rooted in anthropology and natural history, as well as entomology, the study of insects. Other cultural uses of insects, such as biomimicry, do not necessarily lie within these academic disciplines.
More generally, people make a wide range of uses of insects, both practical and symbolic. On the other hand, attitudes to insects are often negative, and extensive efforts are made to kill them. The widespread use of insecticides has failed to exterminate any insect pest, but has caused resistance to commonly-used chemicals in a thousand insect species.
Practical uses include as food, in medicine, for the valuable textile silk, for dyestuffs such as carmine, in science, where the fruit fly is an important model organism in genetics, and in warfare, where insects were successfully used in the Second World War to spread disease in enemy populations. One insect, the honey bee, provides honey, pollen, royal jelly, propolis and an anti-inflammatory peptide, melittin; its larvae too are eaten in some societies. Medical uses of insects include maggot therapy for wound debridement. Over a thousand protein families have been identified in the saliva of blood-feeding insects; these may provide useful drugs such as anticoagulants, vasodilators, antihistamines and anaesthetics.
Symbolic uses include roles in art, in music (with many songs featuring insects), in film, in literature, in religion, and in mythology. Insect costumes are used in theatrical productions and worn for parties and carnivals.
See also
- Arthropods in culture
- Birds in culture
- Plants in culture
- Human interactions with insects in southern Africa
From the infobox 'insects in culture' August 2020
- Human interactions with insects
- Biomimicry
- Cockroach racing
- Cricket fighting
- Entomological warfare
- Flea circus
- Insects in religion
- Jingzhe
Products
Other insects
- Aphid
- Boll weevil
- Colorado potato beetle
- Cottony cushion scale
- Japanese beetle
- Locust
- Phylloxera
- Western corn rootworm
Livestock pests
Biting/stinging
- Insect bites and stings
- Insect sting allergy
- Bed bug
- Bee sting
- Fire ant
- Flea
- Horse-fly
- Louse
- Mosquito
- Wasp
Other pests
- Jan Swammerdam
- Alfred Russel Wallace
- Jean-Henri Fabre
- Hans Zinsser (Rats, Lice and History)
- Lafcadio Hearn (Insect Literature)
Concerns
- Bees and toxic chemicals
- Colony collapse disorder
- Decline in insect populations
- Habitat destruction
- List of endangered insects
- Pesticide
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