This page is the rainforest of Borneo, in South-East Asia. Move your pointer and your bug will flutter, march or creep after you. Choose a different bug at the bottom, and tap the notes to open them.
Borneo right now checking the sky…
Its wings have a larger area than those of almost any other insect: about the size of a dinner plate.
The tip of each forewing looks like the head of a snake, with an eye and a mouth. When disturbed it shakes them slowly.
The adult has no working mouth. It lives for a week or two on the fat it stored as a caterpillar.
Each wing has a see-through patch with no scales. Nobody knows quite what they are for.
The male's feathery antennae can pick up a female's scent from several kilometres away.
The cocoon is spun from tough brown silk, which people in India weave into a cloth called fagara.
Meet them all
Attacus atlas
A vast, rust-brown moth with clear triangular windows in its wings, and wing tips that look like snakes' heads.
Trogonoptera brookiana
A big black butterfly with long, narrow wings, a row of bright green tooth-shaped marks and a red collar.
Hymenopus coronatus
A white and pink mantis with legs shaped like flower petals.
Chalcosoma atlas
A big, shining, bronze-black beetle. The male has three long horns: one on his head and two on his shoulders.
Oecophylla smaragdina
Long-legged, orange-red ants that live in trees, in nests made of living leaves sewn together.
Chrysochroa
A slim, bullet-shaped beetle of dazzling metallic green, with a red-copper stripe down each wing case.
Through the year
It is hot and wet in every month, so all of these can be found all year. The bug following you is shown in red.
Good to know
The forest has stood since the time of the dinosaurs, which has given its insects a long time to become strange.
Some trees here pass ninety metres. Most insects live far above your head.
Mantises that look like orchids, moths with snake heads on their wings, and insects shaped like leaves all live here.
Male butterflies gather in crowds on wet sand and mud to drink the salts they need.
For well over a thousand years, fruit growers in Asia have put weaver ant nests in their trees to kill pests.
Much of the lowland forest has been cleared for timber and oil palm. Many of its insects live nowhere else.
Asian bugs: 1 more place
Real photos of the bugs on this page. Tap one to see it bigger.
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons and are used under free licences. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews. Open a photo to see who took it.
Borneo's rainforest is around 130 million years old, older than the Amazon. One tree there can hold more kinds of insect than live in the whole of Britain.
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