Hymenoptera iz da bom yo

While doing a little research on the taxonomy of hornets I can across HymATol, an online database of the whole order Hymenoptera, with some really spectacular images on it. The animals belonging to this group all have the waspish hourglass-shape to their bodies, and thin membranes for wings. Some of them have ovipositors (egg-laying tubes) that have been adapted for use as venomous stingers. A number of them are social insects that build impressive hives, nests, or mounds, like the ants and honeybees. The way they reproduce leaves a female more genetically similar to her sisters than to her daughters or mother.

To give an idea of the size of this order and, really, the staggering amount of life on this planet, look on the page I link to above. You'll see a list of Latin names like 'Xyelidae' and 'Tanaostigmadae'. Bear with me. Each one of these entries is a family, or a group of related genera. Genera are themselves groups of closely related species: a more familiar example would be that coyotes, dogs, jackals, and gray wolves belong to the genus Canis, foxes to the genus Vulpes, and all of them to the family Canidae. The Canidae belongs to the order Carnivora, along with Felidae (cats), Ursidae (bears), Phocidae (seals), etc. (Wikipedia shows the relationships more clearly and in more detail.)

Take a moment and count how many individual species of animals you might expect to see in your everyday life: off the top of my head, I can only think of about two dozen, and I go out of my way to look for them. In my entire life I've probably met 750 to 1000. So now, consider ants. Look at the end of that list for the super-family Vespoidea, and within that, the family Formicidae. That one word Formicidae is all the ants. If you were to expand this list so you could see the genera, and then each genus so you could see the species, you'd have a list of close to 12,000 species. Of ants. That's not counting the ones we haven't discovered yet, which is probably a very large number itself. Expand each family on this list in turn and you'd see well over 100,000 species. There's an awful lot of these around.