“There is a strange ecto on this vesper”, said Jen, a sentence that only recently would have been difficult for me to comprehend. But now, after a few years of rubbing shoulders with mammalogists in Gorongosa I osmotically absorbed enough jargon to understand that she had noticed an interesting parasitic insect on a bat of…
Category: Hemiptera
Treehoppers
“I need to have my vision checked” was the first thought that popped into my head when my eyes met a treehopper of the genus Bocydium sitting on a thin branch in the Braulio Carillo National Park in Costa Rica, where I was researching several newly discovered katydid species. I had seen many mind-boggling organisms…
Mozambique Diary: How to kill an assassin
I often lament the fact that humans are freakishly gargantuan next to nearly all other animals, and thus unable to appreciate the beauty and complexity of the majority of smaller life forms that share the world with us. Yet, at the same time I am thankful that we do not need to contend with the…
Only in America
I first learned about the existence of periodical cicadas when I was a young boy, still living in z Old Country. The idea that an insect could develop underground for 17 years was crazy enough, but the fact that after all that time every individual within the population emerges at once in a synchronized, massive…
The Smaller Majority 