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 [...]

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 [...]

Bug Photo of The Week: Tachinid Growth Inside Bombyx Mori

I always write about these cool parasitoids which eat the host from the inside out…but I rarely, if ever show pictures of the process. Let’s change that, shall we? If you’re a regular reader of this weblog, you’ve seen me mention Compsilura concinnata before. It’s this neat little parasitoid fly which, unlike many parasitoids, can [...]

Bug photo of the week

Newly emerged Actias luna photographed at the Christina Reiman Gardens butterfly wing on the Iowa State University campus.

Bug photo of the week

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

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 [...]

Spider mimics in lepidoptera

One of the coolest adaptions insects use to survive is when they try to look like something else in order to fool predators into not eating them. Normally, they look like something which tastes bad or a group of harmful species mimic each other to spread that blanket of protection. Occasionally, though, some take a [...]

Sericulture Biocontrol: Trichopria khandalus…fighting parasites with parasites

To fully understand the context of this article, you probably need to read this article over at my old blog about the signficance of tachinid fly pests to silk production. It’s a great peice of work about a parasitoid fly (a tachinid…this blog’s namesake) that’s been devastating the silk industry in India. So…you have a [...]

Compsilura concinnata

Yesterday, I wrote about a fly that’s been killing our native silkmoths. It’s really an unfortunate story, but I didn’t really write anything about the biology of this guy. I’ve been writing about various parasites and going into their biology a little bit, but I don’t think I’ve ever hit on tachinid biology. You can [...]

This is exactly what the internet is supposed to be used for!

I’m doing some research right now on how biocontrol programs have basically destroyed our native moths. Basically, we have a problem with an introduced pest called the ‘gypsy moth’ which I better know as Lymantria dispar. It was introduced way back in the early 1860s and has been nomming up our forests ever since. Infestations [...]