Natural Selection Parallels Artificial Selection in Fighting Crickets

If you’ve ever found big, black crickets in your backyard you’ve seen something from the genus Gryllus. They’re the guys you probably see in your garage during the summer looking for shelter and chirping in your backyard during those warm, lazy nights. They’re pretty ubiquitous and generally pretty recognizable. Crickets chirp to attract mates using [...]

Black Widows are NOT going to kill you and your family

Many spiders get a really bad rap merely because they have hideously toxic venom. Okay, that’s actually a really good reason to be very, very careful when dealing with some spiders. Especially Black Widows. Black widows in areas they live are pretty much ubiquitous. I got the chance to collect them while I was in [...]

This is cool…Caddisfly Jewlery

Going through my daily readings, I stumbled upon this article. As an experiment, Ben Stout introduced aquarium-style colored gravel into an area where the insects were building cases. Sure enough, the exotic material was incorporated into the walls of their underwater cocoons. If the caddis larva would put colored rocks to work in building their [...]

Youtube Gems: Allison Sudol

Every so often, you run into something which describes an aspect of your life in such a blunt manner it makes you wonder if the person knew you at some point in the past. For me, this is one of those songs.

I…never knew

see famous look-a-like faces

Bug photo of the week

Atrophaneura semperi photographed on pointsettia at Christina Reiman Butterfly Gardens on the Iowa State University campus.

Science Journalism and Blogging

So I haven’t been on the blogosphere for too long, but my weblog is just starting to get some decent traffic (mostly as a result of the researchblogging posts I try to do about once a week or so) and I’m just becoming aware of some of the conflicts that take place regularly on the [...]

Oops-Best of Youtube

Looks like I made a wee mistake on my last youtube post. I screwed the HTML up without realizing it. I meant to post this video titled This is not for you and I guess it didn’t post as I expected it to. It’s not letting me embed it, so I’ll just link to it [...]

My encounter with the largest moth in the world

I went up to the Christina Reiman butterfly garden the other day…it’s embarrassing it took me this long since I’m an entomology major, but I’ve been busy with school and various custody-related legal things. But I made time last week, so it’s all good. I just so happened to be lucky enough to catch this [...]

Merry Christmas from your friendly neighborhood godless heathen

I know many people reading this have different philosophical views than I do. So I’m going to take time out to say merry Christmas, happy Solstice, happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or whatever else you celebrate. At this time of year, there’s a lot of war on Christmas garbage going around (which has it’s roots in anti-semitism [...]