Every spring, I see spiny bugs that look like tiny alligators. They spend all day chomping up other insects outside my window. I asked my friend Rich Zack about them. He’s an insect scientist at ...

Complete metamorphosis transforms caterpillars into butterflies, reshaping not only the bodies of the insects but their behaviors and identities. New work reveals in detail for the first time how ...

When a caterpillar hatches from its egg, it spends the first few weeks of its life eating as much as it physically can. Then, it hangs itself upside down from a leaf or stem and sheds its outer skin ...

“For me, it was a road-to-Damascus type of moment,” James Truman, an entomologist, told me, recalling an encounter when he was sixteen. “My family had a summer place, a trailer, on the shores of Lake ...

John E. Woodmansee Photo: Tobacco hornworm on a tomato plant that has been attacked by a parasitic Braconid wasp. The white capsules on its back are the pupal stage of the tiny wasp. Braconid larvae ...