In the rural countryside, they are usually dried in the sun before being sold in the market. Of course, nobody eats adult moths and butterflies their wings and bodies are clothed with the small flat scales and hairs that make them so colorful. One species in Asia, the giant water bug, is now exported from Thailand to Asian food shops in the United States. The true bugs undergo incomplete metamorphosis. This order includes many insects, such as aphids and leafhoppers, which are important agricultural pests, but only the cicadas are used widely as human food.
Metamorphosis is incomplete.
The nymphs of some species, known as periodical cicadas, spend up to 17 years underground where they feed on roots. After 17 years they emerge from the soil, climb up a tree trunk or fence post and molt to the adult stage. When they do appear, however, it is often in vast numbers. That is when they are collected as food, sometimes even by school children in the United States. Many cicadas have shorter life cycles, and some of them were collected as food by Indian tribes in what is now the western United States.