The Insects - Life Nature Library Author:Peter Farb For some 300 million years the insects have consistently been the world's foremost opportunists. We can only speculate on what potentialities ancestral insects must have possessed that enabled their descendants to populate the land and fresh waters with the greatest assemblage of species of any group of organisms. Whatever the mechanism, the ins... more »ects pushed in everywhere, invading and monopolizing every possible niche and exploiting nearly every possible source of food.« less