Bug_girl has a PhD in Entomology. Her bug research involves using pheromones to try to control insect populations without pesticides. Essentially, she makes male bugs horny, and then prevents them from mating. (Please don’t extrapolate from that more that is warranted.)
After a decade or so as a professor, she decided to jump the academic ship and went on to be a dot.com designer, web mistress, and forensic consultant. She is now at a University in Connecticut, giving students (mostly) helpful advice.
Other items you should know about Bug_Girl:
- Turn Ons: Chocolate and intelligent conversation
- Turn Offs: Nascar and mullets
- Bug_Girl is on Google+, with all the other cool nerds
- Bug_Girl is on Twitter, but no one is really sure why
- Bug_Girl would like to be your friend on Facebook
- Bug_Girl also has a Tumblr microblog
- Bug_Girl’s garden can kick your garden’s ass
- Bug_Girl is a guest blogger at Skepchick sometimes
My lovely avatar was made for me by SkepticJill.
If you want to email Bug_Girl, her email address is membracid, and it’s a @gmail.com account.
Sorry, But I Can’t Identify Your Insect
I get many, many emails from people. Some of them want to describe a little insect they saw, and have me identify it. I’d love to oblige you all, but there’s just one problem. (Other than that whole “working for pay/expected to show up daily” thing that really cuts into my blogging time.)
There are >850,000 insect species currently identified. Multiply that by ≈2 billion people with internet access, and you begin to see why I sometimes decline to help you out.
It’s not personal, I just can’t identify a specimen to species without hands-on access to a specimen. There are a few really obvious insects that I can ID with a photo, but for many insects you need to actually count segments and hairs on all sorts of intimate insect body parts for a definitive ID.
Without a photo, it’s rare I can even guess, since there are an almost infinite number of “small brown beetle-ish things” in the world.
A great place to start if you want to figure out what insect you saw/squashed/photographed is the BugGuide, IF you are in the US or Canada. There is also a very nice key to aquatic insects of the Midwest.
