A world of wonder in your backyard

Insects and the millipede, pictured here, belong to a
group of animals called arthropods, which means,
‘jointed legs.’ Millions of arthropods may be living in
your own backyard; all these photographs were taken
over one weekend in one Cayman backyard.

Tuesday,  June  14, 2005

Next time you go out into your yard, take a closer look at the wonderful world of tiny animals that live there, under your feet, and usually unseen.

Insects and millipedes, pictured here, both belong to a mega-animal group (phylum), called the Arthropods, which are characterised by their distinctive jointed limbs which may be modified in a number of ways to form legs, antennae, and mouthparts.

The largest major group of arthropods includes insects, millipedes and centipedes like the ones pictured here, all of which can be found in the Cayman Islands.

All arthropods have a stiff outer covering called a cuticle, because they do not have a skeleton inside their body. They have segmented bodies and show various patterns of fusion between the segments.

There are 1 million different known species of insects in the world, and some experts estimate that there might be as many as 10 million. 

All these species are divided up into about 32 orders, depending on whose taxonomic (naming) system you use, of which, the largest is the Beetles, or Coleoptera, with 125 different families and around 500,000 species.

Complete metamorphosis, as in the butterfly, as it has four stages, adult, egg, larvae (caterpillar in the case of a butterfly) and pupa, whereas incomplete metamorphosis consists of adult, egg, and nymph.

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