Define these terms: vertebrate, invertebrate, exoskeleton, molting, spiracles, ovipositor. Vertebrate: any animal that has a back bone.

Invertebrate: any animal that does not have a back bone.

Exoskeleton: a skeleton on the outside of an animal, protecting the inside of it.

Molting: re-growing an exoskeleton under the currently used exoskeleton, then shedding the old exoskeleton and using the newly grown one.

Spiracles: the tubes in the abdomen that let an insect breath.

Ovipositor: the egg-laying part on some female insects.

Name the three special characteristics of insects. All insects have six legs.

All insects have three main body parts.

All insects have exoskeletons.

List the three body parts of insects. The head, the thorax, and the abdomen.

Learn the name of each insect pictured in this section and at least one fact about it. The walking stick looks like a thin stick with some twigs poking out for legs. It certainly can move, unlike a stick, though!

Lady bugs can be frozen in the winter and will "come back to life" in the spring, quite fine.

Gnats have an extremely small body, but when you can look through a microscope at it, it looks similair to a fly, complete with wings and long legs!

The grasshopper has a very thick body, compared to it's extremely thin legs, but a grown adult can jump twenty times it's length horizontally (and ten times it's length straight up).

Crickets look something like a beetle, but also like a grass hopper at the same time. The loudest species of crickets can make a song as loud as a power saw.

Hornets build their hives out of wood - they chew it up in to a papery mixture they use to build the hive.

In Colorado, western yellow jackets cause around ninety percent of the "bee stings".

The fairy fly is only a hundredth of an inch long but the biggest bug, the Goliath beetle, is four inches long. That means it's four hundred times bigger than the fairy fly!