Predators are far more likely to attack adult moths than caterpillars, highlighting the protective power of metamorphosis.

One example is the importance of pollinators. It is estimated that only about 3% of insects are pests. Metamorphosis refers to the insect’s life cycle, and how it changes and grows into an adult.

Insects may account for between 80 and 90 percent of all animal species, which means 45 to 60 percent of all animal species on the planet are insects that undergo complete metamorphosis according ...

Researchers have studied gene expression dynamics during metamorphosis in two species of flies. Published in the Genome ...

After shedding their final instar, insects that experience complete metamorphosis become pupae. In some cases, pupae enclose themselves inside a hard cocoon, or chrysalis, which butterflies and ...

Complete metamorphosis seems to have arisen in insects only around 350 million years ago, before the dinosaurs. Most researchers now believe that metamorphosis evolved to lessen the competition for ...

More than 60% of all animal species are insects. The majority of these species undergo complete metamorphosis, whereby the ...

With insect metamorphosis, the time line runs, so to speak, backward, with the more recent development, the larva, appearing first and then proceeding as if reversing in time, to become the ...

Holometaboly, or complete metamorphosis, refers to insects such as beetles, flies, butterflies, moths and bees, which hatch as wormlike larvae that eventually enter a quiescent pupal stage before ...

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 ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil ...