Wizzie Brown, a program specialist with the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service and Texas Standard’s go-to insect expert, is helping answer questions from kids about bugs.
She says when male and female insects look different, that is called sexual dimorphism – and this can happen in a variety of ways.
Size
A lot of times, females are going to be larger than the males.
A good example of that is walking sticks or stick insects. The females are very large, very elongated, and then the males are tee-tee tiny.
» RELATED: Six surprising facts about walkingstick insects
Diego Giordano, CC BY-SA 4.0
A lot of times people will call me and they’re like, “Oh, I saw this mom with a little baby walking stick on her back.” That is not a mom and a baby. That is the male, which is on the back of the female. So the female is the very large one. The male is the tiny one.
With walking sticks, their eggs are dropped to the ground, and it takes usually two years for those eggs to hatch out, so the babies are nowhere near where the mom is.
Color
Another way that you can tell males from females is by coloration.
An example of this is the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. The males are going to have yellow markings on the wings, whereas the females are going to either have yellow markings or some of them are just black with kind of very faint striping.
