2015 November 28

   Jeremy Tatum writes:  Here’s a Firebrat from my Saanich apartment building – mercifully not from my own suite, from where Marlin Smyth expelled them earlier this year.

  Are these animals insects?  They certainly used to be thought of as insects, but I believe that in recent years they have been expelled from the Class Insecta.  There are taxonomic changes every year, but it is my understanding that the Phylum Arthropoda now includes a Subphylum Hexapoda, which in turn includes two Classes, Insecta and Entognatha.  Several Orders of primitively wingless creatures – including the Order Thyatira (to which the Firebrat belongs) – now comprise the new Class Entognatha.  Thus the Firebrat is no longer an insect. It is a hexapod, and it is an entognath.

  It is often called a “silverfish”.  Is this correct?   I suppose that you could call any member of the entognath Family Lepismatidae a “silverfish”, provided you spelled it with a small s and you intended the word to cover any lepismatid.  But “the” Silverfish, with a capital S, is a distinct species from the Firebrat – and I have not yet encountered it in my building.  It is probably best to call a Firebrat a Firebrat and a Silverfish a Silverfish.

Firebrat Thermobia domestica (Thy.: Lepismatidae)  Jeremy Tatum