Ever since I can remember I have been having a recurring nightmare: I am in some incredible location – usually somewhere in the tropics, there are amazing insects everywhere, often those that I have been dying to find, but I need to leave immediately and have none of my collecting gear – not a single…
Category: Katydids
Who was Per Brinck?
Taxonomists, myself included, are often asked how we choose names for the organisms we discover and describe. Some are surprised to learn that species are often named after people, but that is also inappropriate to name species after yourself (albeit I know of one such case*). Naming species and genera after people is in fact…
The amazing Glass katydid
Once again things have been slow on my blog as I am trying to finish a million little things before my upcoming departure for Mozambique. I will be arriving there at the beginning of the rainy season, which means tons of insects and other invertebrates, a multitude of frogs, and hopefully some great new stories…
Music in my head
I have always wanted to be a musician. Not that I have any particular musical talents (and never learned to read music), but my fascination with sound was definitely one of the reasons for becoming an expert in the taxonomy of orthopteroid insects, nature’s preeminent musicians. Few things are more pleasant to me than sitting…
Mozambique Diary: The fat coneheads of Gorongosa
A few years ago I was at the Museum of Natural History in London to examine several type specimens of African katydids. One of them was the holotype of a conehead katydid Lanista africana, a species described by the infamous 19th century entomologist Francis Walker. (Stories abound about the quality of his taxonomic work, such…
They can count, too
In March of 1882 a little known journal that had been founded only two years prior was about to go under – nobody wanted to read it, and its owner was tired of putting any more money into it. But an enthusiastic entomologist named Samuel H. Scudder, who at that time, after many years of…
The Smaller Majority 