The rainforest is home to many of the worlds most interesting insects. There are about 30,000,000 different types of insects total in all the rainforests around the world.

There are two categories of rainforest insects. One category includes insects are insects on the rainforest floor. They feed on bacteria and things that have fallen from the trees and have begun to rot. This group includes ants, termites, earth worms, and centipedes. They are all a big help at getting rid of the waste on the ground.

The other category is insects that live in the trees or up in the air. This group includes mostly moths, flying ants, several types of flies, mosquitoes, and butterflies.

Many of the insects of the rainforest are poisonous, including some butterflies. A butterfly does not start out poisonous. When a butterfly is a caterpillar it can eat poisonous plants that won’t hurt it, but when it transforms to a butterfly its’ wings would be black meaning it’s poisonous. If eaten, it could cause a poisonous reaction.
Mosquitoes in the rainforest are different then the ones in the United States of America. Rainforest mosquitoes are a bit larger and carry dangerous diseases like malaria and yellow fever. They feed on the animal’s blood of the rainforest’s blood and some juice from the some of the fruits found in the rainforest.

There are more ants than any other creature in the any rainforest around the world. Sometimes you can find over fifty different kinds of ants together in just one small rainforest tree. One kind of ant is carpenter ants, which travel in bunches, not lines. Leaf cutter ants get chips of leaves and fruit and carry them to the mound they live in to eat later. Fire ants that are very poisonous and eat very little.

There are also a tremendous amount of beetles that fit in both categories of ground and tree insects. Some of the hundreds of kinds of rainforest beetles are rhinoceros beetles, longhorn beetles, leaf beetles, ground beetles, and aquatic beetles. The longhorn beetle looks like a grasshopper. It has antennas two times it’s own size which is usually about three inches long. These antennas help them sense anything and everything around them, which is helpful when it comes to dangerous times. Ground beetles look like gigantic ants and live underground, preferably alone. The rhinoceros beetle has a big horn that only grows on males. They use the horn to fight and compete for females. It has feelings too. Sometimes, after it loses a battle, it shows stress make hissing sounds. This can scare away predators, along with it’s sharp horn to scare them away.

Although there are many known insects in the rainforest, there are still thousands out there that have yet to be discovered.

To learn more about rainforest insects visit the following sites:
http://www.ran.org/kids_action/s06_animals.html
http://www.rainforest-alliance.org/kids&teachers/kids/activities/creature-features/feature2.html
http://www.christiananswers.net/kids/insects.html