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After enjoying a meal in the park a few weeks ago with my girlfriend, I stopped by a sweet gum tree ( Liquidambar styraciflua ) to check for any insects. The sweet gum is abundant in Ohio and is one of my favorite trees. It reminds me of when I was a kid and would throw the seed balls at my friends. Good times. I noticed an orange bug near the trunk of the tree and stooped down to investigate. Success! I had found Pselliopus barberi , a species I like to refer to as the zebra-striped assassin bug. I kept looking and found another one. Then another. And another....all in all, I counted 29 in total! There were about six pairs which were mating, though I disturbed a few (as you can see in the above photo). It's not every day that you find so many insects in one place. So what was going on? The answer lies in the season. This species overwinters as adults, so when it starts getting colder in the fall, the adults band together to find hiding places under bark and wrinkly crevices on tre...

Summer's starting to wind down (despite the temperature still hovering around 90 degrees on a daily basis), and that means new insects are now starting to make their appearances. One of my favorite groups are the assassin bugs, family Reduviidae, and late summer happens to be one of the best times to study them. Ohio's most charismatic species reach adulthood during this time, including the wheel bug ( Arilus cristatus ) and the jagged ambush bugs (genus Phymata ). The ambush bugs are small, stout assassin bugs in the subfamily Phymatinae. The family contains three genera in North America, and the most commonly-seen ones are in the genus Phymata . The subfamily hasn't received as much study as the rest of the assassin bugs, so your best bet for identification is to check out BugGuide's page . Dan Swanson has done some great work to figure out how to identify the Phymata spp., but it can still be tough. A jagged ambush bug, Phymata sp., awaiting its next victim on wing...

My posters from the Ohio Natural History Conference are now online! I've updated my post from the conference with links, and also wanted to post them here for easy reference. I was the lead author on my first poster, "A Biological Survey of the Assassin Bugs (Hemiptera: Reduviidae) at the Barbara A. Beiser Field Station", which is posted below. Click this link or right click on the picture and choose "view image" for a larger (and readable) picture. I was a contributing author on the second poster, titled " UV Fluorescing Millipedes from Southeastern Ohio ." There's a lot of interesting questions raised from this research that I would like to investigate. Hopefully it will inspire others to take an interest in millipedes as well. Note that there is a typo in the first paragraph of the Conclusion section. E. leachii is always found in decaying wood, not in leaf litter. For more information about the conference, you can read over my first blog post...

Regular readers should know by now: I freaking love wheel bugs. Click that picture to enlarge it, sit back, and really look at it for a while. There's no way you'll ever convince me that's not one of the most beautiful creatures in the world. So when I catch wind of the wheel bug being talked about in a negative light, I try to set the record straight. Unfortunately, this time, I could not set the record straight. This link will take you to the website for a local news station serving Pittsburgh, WTAE. The video on the page talks about the wheel bug and how one resident discovered one in her yard and was a little frightened.  Rather than trying to dissuade her of her fears, however, the news team proceeds to FLIP OUT . In what can only be described as an egregious example of shoddy journalism dipped in a vat of ignorance, the video goes on a two minute rampage warning about the dangers of the wheel bug and showing pictures of it to random people on the street, delighting i...

So I have another post started that will explain what I've been up to with my research project, but in the meantime, I have this one. I was reading Richard Conniff's blog and came across his post Learning to Feel at Home . It's filled with great quotations about nature, but one quotation in particular struck me as outstanding. It's lent me a nice springboard for my eventually presentation about my project, and so I'm thinking about starting it off with this picture as the first slide. It's simple, which is part of the reason why I like it. I also expect my audience to not quite understand assassin bugs (or even know anything about them) when I start my presentation, so I think this will help them to understand where I'm coming from and why I chose to pursue my project.

Let's just say that my summer project with assassin bugs is going well so far. More to come soon!