If you have you probably realised pretty quickly that names are very important for talking to, and communicating with other people.

They allow you to give the other person quite allot of information about the animal or even plant that you are talking about.

However not everybody uses the same name for the same animal. For instance slaters, cheesybugs and woodlice are all different names for the same animal in different parts of the world.

Read more about Carl Linnaeus

Since then his original binomial (double name) system has been improved by a number of other scientists, and now you can use the proper scientific name for an animal anywhere in the world and other scientists will know what you are talking about.

The science of naming things is called taxonomy and though it can become quite complicated the basics are easy to understand.

• Plants
• Fungi
• Animals
• very small things called Protoctista
• even smaller things called Bacteria

The living members of the kingdom Animalia are divided into approximately 36 smaller groups called phyla singular phylum.

One of which, the Arthropoda is of particular interest to us. This phylum contains the hard shelled, jointed legged animals and is further divided into four smaller groups called classes.

They are:

• Crustacea, things like prawns, crabs and woodlice;
• Myriapoda, centipedes, millipedes and the like;
• Chelicerata (Arachnida), spiders, scorpions and harvestmen e.t.c.;
• Uniramia (Insecta), things like beetles, bees and flies.

• Diptera, Flies;
• Coleoptera, Beetles;
• Phasmida, Stick-Insects;
• Dictyoptera, Cockroaches and Praying Mantids;
• Hymenoptera, Wasps, Ants and Bees
• Lepidoptera, Butterflies and Moths;

For instance the common small tortoiseshell butterfly is a member of all the following sets:

• Kingdom = Animalia
• Phylum = Arthropoda
• Class = Uniramia (Insecta)
• Order = Lepidoptera
• Family = Nymphalidae
• Genus = Aglais
• Species = urticae

Finally you should know that scientist are still arguing about some of the family, class and order names so these may be different in different books, but until you get to university this is not very important.

Note also that identifying, describing and naming things, i.e. assigning them to particular groups is taxonomy, while arranging those groups in a coherent order which reflects their evolution and relatedness is classification. Another word is Systematics which may be defined as the study of the diversity of organisms and the way they relate to each other, modern Systematics is called Phylogenetic Cladistics and has a whole set of special rules telling you how to do it properly. Cladistics is a good, but young science and like all tools its usefulness reflects the understanding in the mind of the person using it, i.e. not all the results that people using cladistic analyses come to are equally reliable. For more information read the turorial on

Cladistic Analyses or visit one of these links

However at the moment it is important to realise that the greatest use of taxonomy is in the facilitation of communication between workers in similar areas and that the differences between various schemes are fairly unimportant until you know enough to contribute to the argument, a basic understanding of the relationships between various groups of insects can be gained from any basic taxonomic setting.

The 29 insect orders are numbered in an approximate series of evolutionary complexity with the oldest and most primitive groups being listed first. They are further gathered together into a number of groups depending on their degree of relatedness. The numbers to the right of the order name are estimates ( 20 years out of date in most cases but unfortunately the best I have at the moment) of the number of species known from that order in the world, the numbers further to the right represent the numbers for the U.K., and the numbers furthest to the right are from Australia (these are nearly 30 years out of date) if any one would like to supply me with the numbers for other countries I would gladly put them up.

The first four orders are known as the Apterygote orders because all the adults are wingless like the immature stages, these have no true metamorphosis and are the most primitive insects alive today. The other 25 orders are called the Pterygote orders because we believe they wall evolved from winged forms, even those like the Siphonaptera (Fleas) which are all wingless now. these are divided up into 16 Exopterygote orders which have an incomplete metamorphosis (i.e. no pupal stage) and develop their wings outside of their main body, and the Endopterygote orders which undergo a complete metamorphosis including a pupal stage and have their wings develop inside the body which are therefore not visible until the adult insect emerges from the pupa.