Invertebrates is an umbrella term describing animals that neither develop nor retain a vertebral column, which evolved from the notochord. It is a paraphyletic grouping including all animals excluding the chordate subphylum Vertebrata, i.e. vertebrates. Well-known phyla of invertebrates include arthropods, mollusks, annelids, echinoderms, flatworms, cnidarians and sponges.
The subphylum Chelicerata constitutes one of the major subdivisions of the phylum Arthropoda. Chelicerates include the sea spiders, horseshoe crabs, and arachnids, as well as a number of extinct lineages, such as the eurypterids and chasmataspidids.
Antz is a 1998 American animated adventure comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation and Pacific Data Images, and distributed by DreamWorks Pictures. It was directed by Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson from a screenplay by Todd Alcott and the writing team of Chris and Paul Weitz. The film stars the voices of Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Jennifer Lopez, Sylvester Stallone, Christopher Walken, Dan Aykroyd, Anne Bancroft, Danny Glover and Gene Hackman. Some of the main characters share facial similarities with the actors who voice them. The film involves an anxious worker ant, Z (Allen), who falls in love with Princess Bala (Stone). When the treacherous scheming of the arrogant officer General Mandible (Hackman) threatens to wipe out the entire worker population, Z must save the ant colony from the flooded tunnel and strives to make social inroads.
Hemiptera is an order of insects, commonly called true bugs, comprising over 80,000 species within groups such as the cicadas, aphids, planthoppers, leafhoppers, assassin bugs, bed bugs, and shield bugs. They range in size from 1 mm (0.04 in) to around 15 cm (6 in), and share a common arrangement of piercing-sucking mouthparts. The name "true bugs" is often limited to the suborder Heteroptera.
A Bug's Life is a 1998 American animated comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. It is Pixar's second feature-length film, following Toy Story (1995). The film was directed by John Lasseter, co-directed by Andrew Stanton, and produced by Darla K. Anderson and Kevin Reher, from a screenplay written by Stanton, Donald McEnery, and Bob Shaw, and a story conceived by Lasseter, Stanton, and Joe Ranft. It stars the voices of Dave Foley, Kevin Spacey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Hayden Panettiere, Phyllis Diller, Denis Leary, David Hyde Pierce, Joe Ranft, Jonathan Harris, Madeline Kahn, Bonnie Hunt, Brad Garrett, Michael McShane, John Ratzenberger and Richard Kind. In the film, a misfit ant named Flik, looks for "tough warriors" to save his ant colony from a protection racket run by a gang of grasshoppers. However, the "warriors" he brings back turn out to be an inept troupe of Circus Bugs. The film's plot was initially inspired by Aesop's fable The Ant and the Grasshopper.
Missile to the Moon is a 1958 independently made American black-and-white science fiction film drama, produced by Marc Frederic, directed by Richard E. Cunha, that stars Richard Travis, Cathy Downs, and K. T. Stevens. The film was distributed by Astor Pictures and is a remake of an earlier Astor Pictures-distributed film, Cat-Women of the Moon (1953). Missile to the Moon was released in late 1958 as a double feature with Cunha's Frankenstein's Daughter.
In biology, a tagma is a specialized grouping of multiple segments or metameres into a coherently functional morphological unit. Familiar examples are the head, the thorax, and the abdomen of insects. The segments within a tagma may be either fused or so jointed as to be independently moveable.
Tarantula is a 1955 American science-fiction monster film produced by William Alland and directed by Jack Arnold. It stars John Agar, Mara Corday, and Leo G. Carroll. The film is about a scientist developing a miracle nutrient to feed a rapidly growing human population. In its unperfected state, the nutrient causes extraordinarily rapid growth, creating a deadly problem when a tarantula test subject escapes and continues to grow larger and larger. The screenplay by Robert M. Fresco and Martin Berkeley was based on a story by Arnold, which was in turn inspired by Fresco's teleplay for the 1955 Science Fiction Theatre episode "No Food for Thought", also directed by Arnold. The film was distributed by Universal Pictures as a Universal-International release, and reissued in 1962 through Sherman S. Krellberg's Ultra Pictures.
A monster movie, monster film, creature feature or giant monster film is a film that focuses on one or more characters struggling to survive attacks by one or more antagonistic monsters, often abnormally large ones. The film may also fall under the horror, comedy, fantasy, or science fiction genres. Monster movies originated with adaptations of horror folklore and literature.
In science fiction and fantasy literatures, the term insectoid ("insect-like") denotes any fantastical fictional creature sharing physical or other traits with ordinary insects. Most frequently, insect-like or spider-like extraterrestrial life forms is meant; in such cases convergent evolution may presumably be responsible for the existence of such creatures. Occasionally, an earth-bound setting — such as in the film The Fly (1958), in which a scientist is accidentally transformed into a grotesque human–fly hybrid, or Kafka's famous novella The Metamorphosis (1915), which does not bother to explain how a man becomes an enormous insect — is the venue.
The Ant Bully is a 2006 American animated film written and directed by John A. Davis and based on the 1999 children's book of the same name by John Nickle. Starring the voices of Julia Roberts, Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Paul Giamatti, Regina King, Bruce Campbell and Lily Tomlin, it was produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman's Playtone, Davis and Keith Alcorn's DNA Productions, and Legendary Pictures in their first animated film, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.
Earth vs. the Spider is a 2001 science fiction horror television film directed by Scott Ziehl. It is the first of a series of films made for Cinemax paying tribute to the films of American International Pictures. The films in this tribute series reused the titles of old American International Pictures films, in this case the 1958 Bert I. Gordon film Earth vs. the Spider, but are not remakes of the earlier films. The film centers on a shy, obsessive comic book fan who gets injected with an experimental serum derived from spiders, which gives him minor superpowers. More horrific changes occur, slowly transforming him into a grotesque human spider hybrid. A detective begins to investigate when bodies start to pile up covered in cobwebs. The film was nominated for the Saturn Award at the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films, USA.
Arthropods are invertebrates in the phylum Arthropoda. They possess an exoskeleton with a cuticle made of chitin, often mineralised with calcium carbonate, a body with differentiated (metameric) segments, and paired jointed appendages. In order to keep growing, they must go through stages of moulting, a process by which they shed their exoskeleton to reveal a new one. They are an extremely diverse group, with up to 10 million species.
Arachnid is a 2001 Spanish action-adventure natural-horror film directed by Jack Sholder. The film centers on a group of plane crash survivors who has to survive the attacks of a giant alien spider. The film stars Alex Reid, Chris Potter, Rocqueford Allen, Robert Vicencio and José Sancho. It was the second film under the Fantastic Factory Label, created by Brian Yuzna and Julio Fernandez in Spain. The film received negative reviews.
Spiders are air-breathing arthropods that have eight limbs, chelicerae with fangs generally able to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude silk. They are the largest order of arachnids and rank seventh in total species diversity among all orders of organisms. Spiders are found worldwide on every continent except for Antarctica, and have become established in nearly every land habitat. As of November 2023, 51,673 spider species in 136 families have been recorded by taxonomists. However, there has been debate among scientists about how families should be classified, with over 20 different classifications proposed since 1900.
BugGuide is a website and online community of naturalists, both amateur and professional, who share observations of arthropods such as insects, spiders, and other related creatures. The website consists of informational guide pages and many thousands of photographs of arthropods from the United States and Canada which are used for identification and research. The non-commercial site is hosted by the Iowa State University Department of Entomology. BugGuide was conceived by photographer Troy Bartlett in 2003 and since 2006 has been maintained by John VanDyk, an adjunct assistant professor of entomology and a senior systems analyst at Iowa State University. The website has been recognized for helping change the public perception of insects.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a 2018 American animated superhero film featuring the Marvel Comics character Miles Morales/Spider-Man, produced by Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation in association with Marvel Entertainment, and distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing. It was the first animated film in the Spider-Man franchise. Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman from a screenplay by Phil Lord and Rothman, it stars Shameik Moore as Morales, alongside the voices of Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, Brian Tyree Henry, Lily Tomlin, Luna Lauren Vélez, John Mulaney, Kimiko Glenn, Nicolas Cage, and Liev Schreiber. Inspired by the Amazing Spider-Man story arc "Spider-Verse", while also taking inspiration from the Ultimate Marvel comics "The Death of Spider-Man" and Spider-Men that served as Miles Morales' debut, the film's story follows Miles as he becomes the new Spider-Man and joins other Spider-People from various parallel universes who team up to save New York City from Kingpin.
Arthropods play many roles in human culture, the social behaviour and norms in human societies transmitted through social learning, including as food, in art, in stories, and in mythology and religion. Many of these aspects concern insects, which are important both economically and symbolically, from the work of honeybees to the scarabs of Ancient Egypt. Other arthropods with cultural significance include crustaceans such as crabs, lobsters, and crayfish, which are popular subjects in art, especially still lifes, and arachnids such as spiders and scorpions, whose venom has medical applications. The crab and the scorpion are astrological signs of the zodiac.
