Checking it out: Two youngsters consider renting A Bug's Life at Hastings Books Music &Video in Las Cruces.

In Pixar/Disney's computer-animated movie A Bug's Life, Flik the ant is a cute,fumbling inventor who wants to make a difference in his miniature world. While kids in theaters across the nation cheered the little guy as he outsmarted those mean and nasty grasshoppers, entomologists may have been a bit troubled. A male worker ant? It just isn't possible. The same problem occurs with the neurotic character Z-4195 voiced by Woody Allen in the DreamWorks movie Antz.

"I really am glad to see these kinds of movies," says David Richman, a science specialist with NMSU's Agricultural Experiment Station. "They're very entertaining. You just have to keep in mind that they aren't meant to be scientifically accurate."

So goes the life of the misunderstood bug. The truth is, Flik and Z aren't even bugs--not true bugs, anyway. Ants belong to an order of insects called Hymenoptera, which also includes bees, wasps and sawflies.

True bugs belong to the insect order Hemiptera, says Carol Sutherland, an entomologist with NMSU's Cooperative Extension Service. Some familiar examples include stink bugs, chinch bugs and squash bugs.

In the animal kingdom, insects make up one of five major classes of arthropods or jointed-foot animals. The arthropod phylum is the largest with more than one million species of invertebrate animals. The other classes are Arachnida (spiders, scorpions and mites), Crustacea (shrimps, crabs and lobsters), Chilopoda (centipedes) and Diplopoda (millipedes).

Sutherland thinks the biggest misconception insects face in the movies and elsewhere is summed up by the saying, "The only good bug is a dead bug."

"This is definitely not true," she says. "While there are genuine pests that cause damage, there also are many species of insects that prey on these pests."

The majority of insects are not even directly important to humans. "If we're lucky, we see some of them. Many insects are seen only by the specialists who study them," Sutherland says.

To be successful in life, insects need to survive, find mates and reproduce. "An insect's evolutionary goal is to at least replace itself," she explains. "If that's accomplished, there's success for the individual and the species."

Sutherland says an insect's real life is usually short. Most mayflies, for example, live just one day as adults. The life cycle of the 17-year locust is one of the longest, but most of that time is spent hanging out underground in an immature stage, feeding on the root sap of trees and other plants.

During their lives, insects can endure hard times. "Some adults like range caterpillars don't ever eat," Sutherland says. "They do all their eating as larvae, and they don't even have developed mouthparts as adults."

Certainly, insects don't really talk, especially not like Z in Antz, who espouses an "Insectopia." But they do communicate in other ways.

They can make a variety of sounds by drumming on their surroundings; scraping body parts together; or squeezing air through their spiracles, a series of breathing holes. "These sounds aren't fully understood," Sutherland says. But they may reinforce messages such as "We are kin" and "We are safe."

Insects also communicate through the release of pheromones. Odors and aromas given off by a queen ant tell workers to take care of her, groom her and position her abdomen so she can deposit her eggs safely and efficiently.

While some aspects of insects' lives get a little mixed up in the movies, the writers must have been doing some reading in the ant literature, Richman says. In A Bug's Life, the princess ant is named Atta, which is a genus of New World fungus-growing ants. In Antz, the princess is Bala, a South American name for the bullet ant.

Richman also was happy to see some less popular insects in A Bug's Life. "Having a flea, a male ladybird beetle, a male praying mantis, some pill bugs, a rhinoceros beetle and assorted other arthropods was fun," he says.

Of course, he adds with a laugh, pill bugs are actually crustaceans.