--- title: Insects: butterflies, beetles, flies, mosquitoes, grasshoppers — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Insects: butterflies, beetles, flies, mosquitoes, grasshoppers», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: A green caterpillar hangs upside down, turns into a chrysalis, and inside much of its body melts into a kin --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / Insects: butterflies, beetles, flies,… # Insects: butterflies, beetles, flies, mosquitoes, grasshoppers Lesson 37 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/0/) — A green caterpillar hangs upside down, turns into a chrysalis, and inside much of its body melts into a kind of soup that is rebuilt into a butterfly: a body for eating becomes a body for flying. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/1/) — Butterflies and flies taste with their feet, so a red admiral landing on a rotting plum is tasting it as it lands. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/2/) — The coloured dust a moth leaves on your fingers is thousands of tiny scales laid like roof tiles, which is why it is kinder to watch than to hold them. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/3/) — Beetles are the biggest family of animals on Earth: their hard front wings are lids over the flying wings, as you see when a ladybird lifts its spotted cases. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/4/) — Insects can also be fierce: a bombardier beetle fires a boiling puff with a pop, a swarm of locusts can strip whole farms, and the mosquito biting your arm is, for people, the deadliest animal of all. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/5/) — Inside a chrysalis much of the caterpillar's body breaks down, and groups of waiting cells build the wings, legs and body of the butterfly. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/6/) — Butterflies have taste sensors on their feet and drink through a long tube called a proboscis that stays rolled up like a party blower. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/7/) — Butterfly and moth wings are covered in thousands of tiny scales; some colours, like the blue of the morpho, come from the shape of the scales, not from pigment. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/8/) — Millions of monarch butterflies fly up to about 4,000 km from Canada and the United States to mountain forests in Mexico for winter, and it takes several generations to fly back north. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/9/) — Beetles have two hard front wings called elytra that cover the flying wings; about 400,000 kinds have been named, about one in four known kinds of animal. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/11/) — The bombardier beetle mixes two chemicals in its body to make a spray of about 100 degrees that it shoots from its tail end. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/12/) — A housefly tastes with its feet, spits juices to turn food to liquid and mops it up; it can carry germs from rubbish and dung, so we cover food, and its eyes see movement very fast, which is why it is so hard to swat. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/13/) — Only female mosquitoes bite, to get protein for their eggs; the itch is your body reacting to the mosquito's spit, and they find people in the dark by sensing the carbon dioxide gas in their breath, their warmth and their smell. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/14/) — Some mosquitoes carry malaria, which kills about 600,000 people a year, mostly young children in Africa, so mosquitoes are the deadliest animals to people. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/16/) — Desert locusts are grasshoppers that, when crowded, change colour and behaviour and form swarms of billions that eat crops. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/37-butterflies-beetles-flies-mosquitoes-grasshoppers/17/) — The glow-worm is a beetle: the wingless female makes a cold green light in her tail with a chemical reaction, which wastes almost no energy as heat, to show flying males where she is. - ← previous: [Insects: six legs, three parts; ants, bees and wasps](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/36-insects-six-legs-ants-bees-and-wasps/) - next →: [Spiders, scorpions and other eight-legged creatures](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/38-spiders-scorpions-and-eight-legged-creatures/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)