Every insect on this page is exactly 10 letters long — full profile for each.
Looking for 10-letter insects? Here are 13 insects that fit — each linked to a full profile.
Letters are counted across the whole name with spaces, hyphens, apostrophes, and diacritics excluded. "Apple Pie" is 8 letters; "Boeuf Bourguignon" is 16.
Tiny beetles that bore beneath tree bark to lay eggs in galleries — under normal conditions they kill only weakened trees, but when populations explode during drought or after storm damage, they can kill millions of healthy trees across entire forests; the European spruce bark beetle has killed more trees than any other insect in European history.
A brilliantly coloured day-flying moth of chalk downland and coastal grassland — the six-spot burnet has six vivid red spots on metallic blue-black forewings, a warning colouration that advertises its toxicity; burnet moths produce hydrogen cyanide from their own tissues as a chemical defence, making them poisonous to predators; conspicuous in sunshine on downland flowers, flying weakly but apparently without concern for predators.
An insect that feeds, reproduces, and navigates by animal dung — it rolls dung balls away from the pile, buries them, and lays eggs inside; the ancient Egyptians considered the scarab dung beetle sacred and a symbol of resurrection.
The world's greatest jumper relative to body size — the common froghopper can jump 70 cm straight up, accelerating at 400 g, which is greater than the force experienced by a fighter pilot in a dogfight; the larvae are hidden inside "cuckoo spit" — the white froth seen on plant stems each spring.
A common name for several stout-bodied scarab beetles that emerge in early summer in North America, the bumbling, light-attracted nighttime fliers familiar to anyone with a porch light.
The most economically damaging forest pest in Europe — the large pine weevil is a dark, mottled brown weevil whose adults feed on the bark of young conifer trees, girdling and killing transplanted seedlings; it is the primary threat to commercial conifer replanting across Scandinavia and northern Europe, where it can destroy entire newly planted coupes; adults feed at night, concealing themselves under bark and debris by day.
A large family of beetles with characteristically short wing covers that expose most of the abdomen — the most species-rich beetle family, playing crucial roles as predators, scavengers, and even ant-colony infiltrators.
A small, primitive, wingless insect with a silver-gray scaly body and a long-evolutionary lineage, found in damp homes feeding on starches, paper, and book bindings.
A tiny soil-dwelling hexapod that leaps into the air using a spring-loaded tail appendage — among the most abundant land animals on Earth, with millions per square meter of healthy soil playing a critical role in decomposition and nutrient cycling.
Britain's largest insect — the male stag beetle's enormous antler-like jaws can be longer than his body but are used for wrestling rival males rather than biting; a declining species dependent on rotting wood in old gardens and ancient parkland; adults do not feed and live only a few weeks as adults after 3–7 years as grubs.
The most damaging garden pest in Britain — its soil-dwelling larvae eat through the roots of container plants and garden favourites including fuchsia, begonia, heuchera, and strawberry, causing sudden plant collapse; the adult is a dull black beetle that notches leaf edges at night and cannot fly.
A small blue butterfly of California's San Francisco peninsula — extinct since the 1940s, the first North American butterfly species lost to habitat destruction, and the namesake of the Xerces Society for invertebrate conservation.
A tiny, obscure insect in the small order Zoraptera — sometimes called "angel insects" — known mostly to specialists, with a strange dimorphism and a phylogenetic position that has long puzzled entomologists.
That's our current list of insects with exactly 10 letters. Need a different length? Try the browse-by-length pills in the sidebar, or combine with a starting letter — for example, 10-letter insects that start with A.