Australian garden insects with Denis Crawford
Only a tiny minority of insects are pests. The Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems would collapse without insects. That means insects are pretty important – so how can you attract them into your garden?
This video is an edited version of a webinar I gave for Sustainable Gardening Australia (https://www.sgaonline.org.au/) last week on the importance of insects in gardens.
There are many species of flies across several families that are associated with fungi. In the video I talk about a few of them, but these fighting flies steal the show!
The males of the species (Tapeigaster sp.) are noted for perching on the top of various fungi – including common ones like field mushrooms. On small fungi there is usually only one male per fungal cap, and he tries to defend it from competing males. The aim is to mate with a female that is attracted to the fungus. She wants to lay her eggs in the gills of the fungus so the hatching larvae can feed on the fungus.
Check out the video to see what happens!
It used to be thought that all animals with six legs were insects. It is now widely accepted that there are two groups of six-legged animals – the insects (class Insecta) and the entognathous hexapods (class Entognatha).
Entognathous means “inside jaw” – which refers to how their mouthparts are enclosed in folds of the head. Hexapod means “6 legs”.
The star of the show is Heterojapyx, a dipluran in the order Diplura. Don’t know what that is? Please watch the video to find out. It’s an amazing animal!
There is an old blog post on the same subject here.