Dirt is dangerous; the insect world is obsessed with staying clean

You would be shocked to see that these insect liked being clean as much as us!

With the thought of insects and animals, you won’t actually think that they liked being clean, with some animals who actually don’t like water, it’s not that hard to imagine any animals thanking a bath on their own. But with a lot of dust particles and stuff that can make us feel dirty, we would actually want to take a bath every day. It’s different in the animal kingdom and it has always been.

Guillermo Amador, who is a doctoral student in Georgia Institute of Technology, has conducted a study on how the hairs of animals affect their cleanliness after he has successfully deciphered the real reason why we had eyelashes. Finding this out was a complete accident and as he as successful on his first study, he wanted to continue to see the effect of the animal’s eyelashes. But what he saw as outstanding.

He saw that the animals, mammals and insects differ in the number of their hair. Apparently, the hairs that the animals have in their body affect their cleanliness. The more hair there is, the more dust particles that it is able to collect. And we all know that mammals, like to bathe in the water and the cats choose to use its tongue. But the insects hold far more questions than we can answer and that resulted to them having an experiment on 10 different insects. What they saw as that the insects have more hair than that of mammals. And you can actually compare the hairs of a bee to a squirrel, and you will see that they actually have the same amount of hair which is 3 million strands. Why would insects use that much hair? Well, that is a serious question that is hard to find.

Apparently, insects use much of their hair for their flight to find out the direction of the wind and to sense their surroundings. It’s basically their sense of touch. But they also use them to make themselves clean. But the real question is how so? It’s because those hairs can attract so much dust particles that it can weigh them down whenever they are in flight. Having so much hair, it seems that they have found good use to it.

The hairs actually cover most of their body parts that needs covering, and having too much hair can result to them having to contain the dirt and dust to only a small amount of surface area in their body. Let’s say that they have at least 3mm of hair, the dirt ill come for only in 1mm of their hair, and they will clean themselves by how the cat cleans its head. They wipe it off on their own. They use their so many legs and wipe it away. Having to contain all those dirt in just an mm of hair is really helpful and they can now be able to swish it off as fast as it came. Now that is just fantastic, isn’t it?