I was busily looking for bark mimicking katydids in Cambodia, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye some slow movement on the trunk of a nearby tree. At first I couldn’t quite grasp what I was seeing – a yellow, wormy thing, wiggling its way out of the bark. But after a…
Month: December 2012
Weevils
J. B. S. Haldane, the British geneticist, is often quoted for proclaiming, “The Creator, if He exists, has a special preference for beetles.” (*) With between 275,000 to 350,000 described species of beetles it is hard to argue with this statement. Of these, about 60,000 species belong to a single family, the weevils (Curculionidae), making…
Mass migration
Annual mass migrations of zebras, wildebeest, Thompson gazelles, and other assorted ungulates on sweeping, dry African plains are the source of some of the most evocative and celebrated images of our world at its finest. Cue in the blazing red orb of the setting sun as the endless string of magnificent, heroic silhouettes passes across…
More babies
Earlier today Kristin was reading on the couch, when she noticed a small insect crawling up the wall. “It is either a very small mantis or an assassin bug”, she opined, exhibiting some pretty good entomological expertise. I was not expecting to see either but, sure enough, it was a small praying mantis. Then we…
Predatory katydids
Earlier this week I spent a couple of days in Philadelphia, visiting my Holy Shrine, the Orthoptera collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences. I was giving a talk at a meeting of the American Entomological Society (not to be confused with its much younger, up-and-coming offshoot, the Entomological Society of America.) It was also…
The Smaller Majority 