Aphids have mutualistic viruses!

Aphids can be a pain in the ass to gardeners and farmers. Although they look pretty harmless, they’re to plants what mosquitoes are to people and more. They transmit some pretty serious diseases which cause millions of dollars in damage per year. They’re also famous for their fecundity-they’re parthenogenic and their daughters are actually born [...]

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 [...]

Mosquitoes and host range evolution on Galapagos

Let’s talk about something that really isn’t given top billing amongst many vector biologists for a minute. It’s not that the subject is taboo, it’s simply that most of the money that comes into researching vector borne disease comes in to fight diseases which afflict humans and animals that are important to humans. Most vector [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Aphid Wasps From National Geographic

A really cool video about parasitoid wasps from National Geographic. You can see the larva developing on the inside of the aphid and the wasp emerging from it’s mummy.

Strepsiptera…a rare example of true insect parasitism

I’ve done a lot of writing about parasitoids as of late…but I’ve rarely gotten around to mentioning parasites. There’s a good reason for this, believe it or not. This is an entomoblog, and I rarely get around to discussing the true diversity of the animal world around us. I pretty much focus on insects and [...]