Insecta

Description

Humans consider many insects as pests as they damage crops and food resources and spread diseases. However, many insects perform beneficial roles for humans such as pollination of plants (including food crops), breakdown carrion (detritivores) and produce or are food and resources themselves (e.g. bees produce honey, silkworms produce silk). Many insect families are recognised as having an aquatic life-stage. Some commonly-known insect orders containing aquatic families includes true water bugs (hemiptera), aquatic beetles (coleoptera), flies and true flies (diptera), caddisfly larvae (trichoptera), mayfly larvae (ephemeroptera), stonefly larvae (plecoptera) and dragonfly larvae (odonata).

Aquatic insects are important components of wetland ecosystems. They are food for many other animals, including fish, platypus and birds. They are also important for their role in cycling nutrients and carbon through wetland systems.

Aquatic insects and other invertebrates have different sensitivities to pollution and for that reason are indicators in wetland assessments. They respond to many kinds of changes in water quality or to physical disturbance to the wetland structure, hydrology or the landscape around the site[1]. 

To find out more about species in your area see WetlandSummary.

For specific information on wetland species sightings please go to WetlandMaps or Wildlife Online.

Additional information

• Atlas of Living Australia provides species information, data sets, images and mapping.
• Waterwatch estuary guide provides school level information about invertebrates
• Australian Freshwater Invertebrates Directory Guide
• Australian Aquatic Invertebrates covers taxa represented in fresh or saline, running or still, permanent or ephemeral inland waters are included.
• The find-a-spider guide
• Brisbane Insects and Spiders
• lifeunseen.com is a photo and information collection by Nick Monaghan.
• CSIRO Australian National Insect Collection
• Insects in the Wet Tropics

References

1. ^ Helgen, J (2002), Wetland Health Evaluation Program (WHEP) Macroinvertebrate Sampling. [online] Available at: http://www.mnwhep.org/id28.html [Accessed 19 September 2012].
2. ^ Queensland Government. Queensland Primary Industries Insect Collection. [online] Available at: http://collections.ala.org.au/public/show/co52 [Accessed 12 July 2012].
3. ^ Ruppert, EE & Barnes, RD (1994), Invertebrate Zoology, Thomson Learning.
4. ^ Queensland Museum. What insect is that?. [online] Available at: http://www.qm.qld.gov.au/Find+out+about/Animals+of+Queensland/Insects/What+insect+is+that [Accessed 12 July 2012].

Last updated: 13 April 2017