In common English the word ābugā is frequently used to refer to an extremely diverse variety of small animals from multiple phyla, many of which bear very little close relation to each other, in either a morphological or phylogenetic sense.
The scientific community generally tends to try to avoid such ambiguous and undescriptive designations, and unsurprisingly, in its technical usage, the word ābugā applies only to a relatively narrow group of Exopterygotan insects: the Hemipterans, or true bugs.
Hemipterans are distinguished by the possession of specialized piercing and sucking mouthparts, which the majority use to siphon out plant juices, although there are several notable exceptions, including the predatory assassin bugs and hematophagous (blood-drinking) bedbugs. In addition to those already mentioned, the true bugs contain such well-known insects as cicadas, aphids, stinkbugs, and water striders, among others.
In all, there are estimated to be 50,000 ā 80,000 species of true bugs. Hemiptera is thus in absolute terms an astoundingly large and diverse group, but is also a relatively minor part of the incredibly huge insect class, itself containing perhaps 90% of all animal species, with estimates of its extent ranging from 6 to 10Ā million distinct species. Using those ranges, Hemipterans can be said to account for (very roughly) only around 1% of the vast breadth of extant insect species.
Also commonly thrown under the informal umbrella of ābugsā in its vernacular sense are a great many animals which are not even insects, including: spiders, scorpions, ticks, and mites (arachnids); lobsters, crabs, and woodlice (crustaceans); millipedes and centipedes (myriapods); snails and slugs (mollusks); and earthworms and leeches (annelids). Heaping these animals in a collective group with insects, while excluding various more closely related animals from that designation, is a travesty of science committed simultaneously against the fields of cladistics, taxonomy, and common sense.
Nontechnical ābugsā not only fails to agree with the established scientific meaning of the word, but actually does not even describe a valid taxonomic or cladistic grouping at all. As such it risks causing confusion among the uninformed general population, who might be led to believe that there is actually some semblance of a relationship between the varied species typically lumped under the term.
A fly is not a bug. Neither is a spider. There is no reason to continue to call these animals such, when there are already numerous other thoroughly descriptive terms available, and when ābugā is ambiguous, tends to promote a lack of public taxonomic understanding, and is technically incorrect.Ā
nothing 