Homeopathy is Bullshit: Headlouse Edition!

One of the not-so-great things about being a parent is that your kid occasionally gets headlice. They seem to particularly like my kid for some reason because this is the second time I’ve had to deal with this. Either way, it’s getting really, really annoying. So I go to Walgreens to get a louse shampoo [...]

Cheshire’s Top 5 Entomology Videos

I post a lot of videos here on this blog because I find them a very useful and interesting teaching tool. Why explain the life cycle of a parasitoid wasp in two or three boring paragraphs when I can simply hop over to youtube and find a video explaining the same thing narrated by David [...]

Always Knew Something Was Wrong With Airline Food…

I’m planning on going to Denver in about two months on business…and I ran across this warning letter from the FDA to a restaurant in Denver International Airport: • Employees handling food with bare hands or with unwashed gloved hands • Water dripping from the ceiling into equipment/utensil cleaning areas • Gaps from 1-2.5 inches [...]

Do bats REALLY eat mosquitoes?

One of the debates a lot of entomologists have is whether bats actually have an impact on mosquito populations. Sure, we hear all the time that bats eat mosquitoes, but there are good reasons to doubt this. I’ve had this discussion with instructors before and there’s really no consensus. We know bats occasionally eat mosquitoes. [...]

Preventing release of alarm pheromones increases homosexual pairing in bed bugs.

I really don’t think it’s possible to write a boring post on bed bugs. The way in which they reproduce is simply one of the most bizzarre…and brutal…methods of insemination in the animal kingdom. One of my favorite webcomics, Dinosaur Comics described their reproduction quite well: I also like writing about the biological basis behind [...]

More Sketchy Science: Do Tomatoes Really Eat Insects?

I’ve been seeing this story more and more around the news, exemplified by this Telegraph article…apparently, there are some researchers that discovered that tomatoes have hairs on them which trap and kill small insects. The Telegraph reports: New research shows that they capture and kill small insects with sticky hairs on their stems and then [...]

Insects use tools, but do they self-medicate?

This is my first researchblogging post in awhile…so I figured I’d make it worthwhile by writing a really, really long post and actually deconstructing a scientific paper. I’ve seen the video of the tool using octopus…and it is neat. Here’s a science daily article, and here’s the video below: Using tools is something which is [...]

Institutionalized rape-stabs

If you don’t read Dinosaur Comics, you really should. They mentioned a favorite subject of mine…Traumatic Insemination. They also mentioned the female counter-adaptation…the paragenetalia. As the comic says…this is where the male bedbug splooges when he stabs his girlfriend. Here are some pictures of the paragenetalia. As you can see, there’s quite a bit of [...]

PETA’s entomological ignorance…a bit worse than I thought

The other day, I went on a rant about PETA acting overly sanctimonious by sending President Obama a flytrap because he had the audacity to swat a fly on national TV. Well…one of my readers forwarded me this article about humane cockroach control. When PETA doesn’t have to distort any facts, they actually write halfway [...]

PETA’s entomological ignorance.

PETA is one of those groups that bases it’s public statements on what it can best display it’s righteous indignation at. Remember Obama killing a fly at his interview? Here’s the video: Well, guess how PETA responded? But now People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling it an “execution,” wants the commander-in-chief to show [...]