Insect eggs range across eight orders of magnitude in size, and come in a stunning variety of shapes, a new database of almost 10,500 descriptions of eggs from about 6,700 insect species shows.

Some eggs, such as that of Orestes draegeri, have tiny hairs that function like Velcro, fixing them in place. One successful stick insect (Ramulus mikado) can be found all over the islands of Japan.

The queen then uses her stored sperm to produce sterile worker females. She will initially lay between ten and 20 eggs - and when the carnivorous grubs hatch, they are fed on chewed-up insects.

In the first experiment, they fed more than 40 eggs of each species to the birds and found that, after they were defecated out three hours later, between five and eight per cent of the eggs didn't ...

Between 5 and 20 percent of the eggs survived the ordeal—and a couple of eggs from one species even hatched. As The Washington Post ’s Sarah Kaplan notes, this isn't a great survival rate.

Insects are generally having a hard time; changing environments, changing climate, habitat loss and the use of insecticides are all taking their toll on these vital creatures.