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To prove it wrong, entomologist May Berenbaum,1 recipient of the 2014 National Medal of Science, examined about ten centuries of literature and found only one report of an earwig actually crawling into a human’s ear. They can be startling to encounter because of their prominent pincers, but...
nearly 2,000 species are scattered everywhere but in Earth’s polar regions. Earwig comes from the Old Englishear-wicga, which means “ear wiggler”—so named because the insect was once thought to seek out human ears to reside in.
Earwigs may look dull—until they open their wings, shimmering structures that expand 10-fold and lock without the use of muscles.