system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Do insects heal from injury?

I drive a big rig for a living and I massacre a fair number of bugs each day. I have often wondered ... do some of the bugs bounce off and survive, and if so, do they heal?

It may seem like an obvious answer (of course they do!) but I'm just not sure. Most insects, as far as I know, have a fairly short lifespan, and have fairly narrowly-targeted behavior: be born, grow, morph, reproduce, die. What I'm wondering is - with such a short lifespan, did they evolve sophisticated systems for healing themselves from injury? Or even simple ones? Or did evolution go down the other path, and simply decide that something so numerous and relatively cheap to manufacture needn't bother be self-repairing?
gpt
To some extent, yes they do. Insect 'blood' will 'clot' in a manner analogous to mammal blood, and for similar reasons. But the kind of injuries an insect might sustain hitting a moving vehicle are unlikely to heal successfully. Insect exoskeletons don't heal in the same way as our bones, and in the case of an adult flying insect the animal isn't going to moult again, and so anything but a minor injury to the exoskeleton is probably not going to end well for the insect.  In the case of an insect which is going to moult again, it is possible for a damaged appendage to grow back inside the exoskeleton and then be exposed after the next moult. This is more noticeable in spiders - if you notice a spider with one leg shorter than the others, it probably lost a leg when younger, and then regrew it.