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 [...]

Vector-Born Diseases: An Introduction

Insects have a profound effect on human and animal health in many ways. Some of these, like the human botfly and the Tumbu fly cause their damage by feeding directly on people. Neither of these are particularly damaging, merely painful however some insects like Tunga penetrans infest people to the extent of actually needing medical [...]

Using Mosquitoes to ‘Smartbomb’ Breeding Grounds

So let’s continue the theme of the AWESOME papers I ran across this semester and didn’t get to blog about. I find every aspect of this paper to be simply cool. Controlling mosquitoes consists of two main methods, to put things as simply as possible. You can kill adults and larvae and you can destroy [...]

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. [...]

Florida Dengue Outbreak

Here’s an interesting story out of Florida…it seems they have a widespread outbreak of Dengue fever. Dengue is an interesting virus…it’s an arbovirus, which means it’s a virus spread by arthropods. In this case, it’s a mosquito. So…let’s talk about Dengue. What is it, what vectors it, how does it reproduce inside the vector and [...]

Native aquatic insects may save lives.

Conservation is very important, even something as seemingly insignificant as insects. Most people don’t realize exactly how important bees are to our everyday activities, and most people certainly don’t think twice about those strange black and white bugs they find in their pool. However, a study that came out in the most recent issue of [...]

Bill Gates: Made of Win!

So here’s Bill Gates releasing what I assume to be Anopheles mosquitoes on a crowd of unsuspecting confrence-goers to make a point about malaria. I have soooo much respect for him now. But Vista still sucks.