The World's Smallest Insect

-It's hard to believe, but this insect is a species of wasp.
The world's smallest insect

belongs to the fairy fly or fairy wasp family. On average, they are only 0.5 to 1 millimeter long. Irish entomologist Alexander Henry Haliday first recorded the discovery of the fairy fly in 1833, describing them as "atoms of the order Hymenoptera".

Hymenoptera is a large order of insects that includes sawflies, wasps, bees and ants. Fairy flies can be found all over the world and thrive in a wide variety of environments and ecosystems, from wet rainforests to dry deserts.


The smallest insect in the family, Dicopomorpha echmepterygis, is only .139 millimeters long and therefore almost impossible to detect with the naked eye. They have neither wings nor eyes, their mouths are just holes and they have two small antennae. The smallest flying insect is a species of fairy fly called Kikiki Huna (15 mm), which lives in Hawaii, Costa Rica and Trinidad. Kikiki is closely related to another fairy fly species, the tinkerbella nana wasp, whose name somehow fits its diminutive (17 mm) size perfectly.

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