Its antennae wave as it lays an egg on the prey, which will become a living refrigerator for her baby who will feed on the still living, but helpless, paralysed victim. 

It’s science fiction of the highest quality. Except it’s not. 

The insect world is the domain of the weird, the quirky and the downright freaky. 

Insects have evolved a range of defences and procreation techniques that make them the stuff of nightmares; parasitic babies, acid excretion, venom and intense camouflage.

“This is where they got the ideas for aliens and stuff like that,” Queen Victoria Museum entomologist Simon Fearn said.

“There are so many weird and wonderful stories in the bug world that where do you begin?”

Just a month ago the wax worm caterpillar stole the headlines from the Kardashians for it’s unusual penchant for plastic. 

It was discovered the caterpillar is able to digest plastic, making it, understandably, the most popular bug in the room.

But Tasmania boasts it’s own fair share of wacky and wonderful insects. 

“Bluebottles; everyone sees them, everyone thinks they know what they are … everyone thinks they're ants but they’re actually a wingless flower wasp,” Mr Fearn said. 

Dedicated mothers to the last, what people also may not know is that the wily female bluebottle has a macabre way of ensuring the success of her young. 

The metallic blue coloured wasp trawls the underground tunnels of mole crickets until she happens upon a hapless victim, when “She jumps on the mole cricket and she paralyses it with her sting.”

“The mole cricket is perfectly fine, it's still alive but it cant move, so she lays an egg on it and her egg hatches into her grub and it then spends the next couple of months eating the paralysed but still perfectly alive mole cricket,” Mr Fearn said.

“But it only eats the non-essential parts of its body first, so it will eat the legs and the wings, then it'll go inside and eat the fat but it will leave the major internal organs until last so the mole cricket stays alive as long as possible while it’s still feeding.”

Tasmania boasts several species of parasitic flower wasp and while the mothers may be ruthless the male wasps are actually quite the gentlemen. 

The female wasps have dense, heavy bodies and short legs, not at all appropriate for climbing the trees they need to feed, and that’s where hubby comes in. 

“The males are really big, they can fly really well and they're large because they need to pick these girls up, which are actually quite big, and fly them up to blossom so they can feed,” Mr Fearn said. 

Then there are those insects that have, there's no other way to put it, anger management issues. 

Most Tasmanians would know the wrath of the small in stature, but not in attitude, jack jumper. 

“We don't just have one type of jack jumper here we have at least three, possibly more,” Mr Fearn said (sorry folks). 

“There’s the standard one, which is quite large, and then there's a little dwarf species that’s only around half the size and then there’s another one that likes wetter forest.

“It’s the really common large one that’s responsible for all the problems down here of people developing anaphylaxis.”

So what makes these little critters so angry?

“Echidnas. They just roam across the countryside and they find a nest and bust it apart and they eat all the grubs and the eggs ... in their home range they know where every nest is and they come by every year and bust it apart and suck all the grubs out,” Mr Fearn said. 

“Thats why [jack jumpers] are so hyper-aggressive because they think you're an echidna, so if you interfere with the nest they all boil out of it and just go crazy.”

When you put it that way, can you really blame them for getting a little worked up?

Then there are those ants who laugh at venom; they’ve got acid. Formic acid. 

“Ants that don't have a sting, your sugar ants are a classic example, what they do is they squirt out formic acid,” Mr Fearn said. 

“If a bird grabs them they give it a squirt of the formic acid and they ... spit it out.”

You will be able to recognise these acid-wielding ants by their smell. Ever squashed a piss ant? That smell. 

“It’s usually the primitive ants … that have the sting because obviously ants evolved from wasp so the more primitive the ants, like the inchmans, they tend to sting whereas the more evolved families of ants have moved to formic acid,” Mr Fearn said. 

Now don’t go thinking all insects are bad news. Like anything, you have your poor sorts and your great blokes. 

Take the praying mantis for example. 

“Praying mantises, like all males, struggle to find a mate. They're relatively short lived so there’s no point hanging around after you've mated, so you can give your eggs and your offspring the best chance of success by letting the female eat you to provide nutrients for the eggs you've just fertilised,” Mr Fearn said.

“So the male virtually offers himself as a prey item and that’s his final act.”

And who said chivalry was dead?

The moral of the story is; if you’re a praying mantis it’s all about picking a winner.

“It doesnt always happen, it probably depends how healthy the female is, so if she’s in a spot where there’s lots of food and she’s doing all right she’s probably not that concerned with eating the male, but if she’s a bit undernourished he certainly becomes a prey item,” Mr Fearn said. 

“Organisms don’t do things without a reason, there’s always a reason; to give your genes the best chance of going forward.”

Praying mantises are closely related to another insect, which Mr Fearn believes gets a bit of an undeserving bad rap. 

“Praying mantises, if you look at their faces and you look at the face of a cockroach they are virtually identical ... preying mantises are basically just a predatory form of cockroach,” he said. 

“There’s three or four pest cockroaches that have given the hundreds of native ones that don’t do any harm at all a bad name … people just tarnish them all with the same brush unfortunately.”

So, is it really true that if there were a nuclear holocaust cockroaches would survive?

“They’re very, very adaptable and flexible, they can pretty much eat anything, they’re very good at hiding under things and staying out of trouble … there are thousands of species of cockroach and many wouldn't survive a nuclear blast but here are some pest species that are really, really good at hanging,” Mr Fearn said. 

And if you’re missing some of the bad-ass traits of other insects, well there’s a solution for that too - cue stick insects.

Have you ever seen a stick insect? Of course you haven’t, you’ve only seen sticks. And there proves the point, camouflage is just as cool as acid and venom. 

“They have no real way of defending themselves against a large bird and they’re a really good thing to catch and eat because they're nice and soft and squishy and the females are full of eggs and they're full of fat ... so the way they stay out of trouble is to look like plants and sticks and leaves and just hope that things won’t see them,” Mr Fearn said. 

Well, here’s hoping right?