If you think mammals are the peak of the evolution, you may be right.
But this is only from the point of view of biological complexity.
Cause the animals with the highest evolutionary success are the insects.
There about 900,000 described species, and scientists evaluate their real number from 2 to 10 million species.
Calculating the total number of the insects on the globe, researchers found it overpasses by 200 billion times the number of humans.
You may step on them, but they are here to stay...
Their reproductive power is amazing: in warm conditions, in less than one month, a locust turns into adult and each female deposes hundreds of eggs during a season.
In a little cloud of locusts (photo above), covering 100 square kilometers (40 square miles), there are about 70,000 tons of insects, thus several tens of billions of
locusts, each weighing 2 grams.
In fact, in some environments, in just one square kilometer live more insects than humans on the whole planet.
Ants make in ecosystems 15-25 % of the total animal biomass.
Just one ant colony cleanses of other insects a surface of 2-3 forest hectares.
The army ants (Eciton) (photo center), found in tropical America, have colonies of 100,000 to 2,000,000 individuals, that will kill and eat everything in their paths and in other species, the colonies can count for 20 million individuals.
Even in a bee hive, there are 80,000-100,000 individuals.
Some tropical bees and wasps are able to fly at 72 km (43 miles) per hour!
The Monarch butterfly from North America makes seasonal migrations, similar of those made by birds, of 3010 km (1900 miles) length.
To store one honey kilogram (2.5 pounds), the bees of a hive must visit roughly 7 million flowers and make 240,000 km (150,000 miles), which means 10,000 flight hours.
One species of fly has a wing rhythm of over 1,000 beats/second, much more than the hummingbirds.
These are amazing performances for such small creatures.
The termite colonies, made of millions of individuals, build mounds that can be 7.5 m (25 feet) tall over the soil but underground, they can be 75 m (225 feet) deep and extend hundreds of meters away.
It's like us building an edifice as big as the Himalayan Mountains.
Insects are more numerous and varied in the warm zones of the globe.
That's why the insectivorous animals in temperate zones are much smaller than the ones in the tropical areas (even of the general ecological rule would say the opposite).
Woodpeckers are the largest birds whose diet is based in insects.
To see how much insects the birds destroy, we must say that a tit eats daily an insect amount equaling its own weight.
In a summer season, a tit family will consume 50-60 kg of insects and larvae, which means millions of individuals.
Amongst mammals, the hedgehog, which rarely overweighs 1 kg (2.5 pounds) is the largest insect eater in Europe.
But in tropics, due to rich insect feast, insectivorous mammals can be pig sized, like the African aardvark (photo below), that can weigh 80 kg (200 pounds) and the South American giant ant eater can weigh till 65 kg (140 pounds).
Large pangolins were found to weigh 33 kg (80 pounds).
These huge insectivorous animals exploit a concentrate insect source: ants and especially termites' colonies.
An aardvark can ingest up to 50,000 termites each night.
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