cnestus

[cnestus]

Velvet ant from Nicaragua. I feel like these photos don’t emphasize just how ridiculous her giant noggin is.

[cnestus]

Box of Velvet Ants the Wizard

[cnestus]

Look at the face on this absurd beast. male Andrena anisochlora mining bee

[cnestus]

I have a fondness for Pelecinid wasps, i have 2 specimens and they are FUNKY. I dont know much about them besides that they are parasitic and dont have a stinger, can you tell me a fun fact about them?

I'm a fan of those as well. I collected a few in Nicaragua in 2011. afraid I don't have any fun facts about them on hand but Ted Macrae did a nice blog post about them a while back that I recommend reading.

photo from the linked post

[cnestus]

Our hotel room came with a free complimentary spider beetle, Gibbium aequinoctiale (Ptinidae) in the bathtub

[cnestus]

☼:{

Today’s Nice Bug is just this lil guy

can u believe this

(Newly hatched owlfly larva, Ascalaphinae. Photographed in South Africa by sallyslak)

[cnestus]

some excerpts from the 1988 paper An Extreme Case of Interspecific Territoriality: Male Anthidium manicatum (Hymenoptera, Megachilidae) Wound and Kill Intruders about how male european wool carder bees will attack on average over 70 other insects per hour by ramming into them ass-first.

[cnestus]

STOP IT

[cnestus]

cute as hell anthidiine bee spotted on an artichoke flower in portland oregon. Pseudoanthidium nanum, probably

[cnestus]

FOUND ANOTHER ONE

HEY WANNA SEE A COUPLE FUCKED UP MUTANT BEES?

so i've mentioned in the past that while i don't go out of my way to catch bees, they often end up in the pest monitoring trap samples that i process for work. since i hate seeing cute animals go to waste i've made a project out of pinning and identifying them whenever possible. one of the more common bees that i see around this time of years are the tiny & shiny genus Ceratina:

(not my photos, but the rest in this post are mine)

(fun fact they're actually most closely related to the giant carpenter bees you're probably more familiar with)

okay so for reference here's a couple examples of standard male Ceratina faces:

kinda silly looking! but now check out this freak i found this week:

note that not only are the eyes nearly wrapping around the face but the ocelli are totally missing and the antennal insertions have merged into a weird giant pit in the middle of his face. sadly he's a little beat up and one of the antennae was broken off along with some leg parts.

but okay if you think that's weird, check out this NEXT guy:

what the fuck! that smaller antenna isn't broken off like the previous guy it's just... like that. i have absolutely no explanation for either of these oddities.

honestly Ceratina are so common that i'd almost gotten to the point of not bothering to keep them when they show up in my traps but i'm really glad i took a closer look and spotted these freaks. have not attempted to ID either to species yet.

[cnestus]

Video by me and Ainsley Seago trying to explain the important work insect taxonomists do

[cnestus]

Golding et al. (2023)

[cnestus]

Found this outrageously small (0.6 mm) critter stuck to a Podalonia specimen.

[cnestus]

Sorry if this is annoying but I'm very curious

What advice do you have for a (soon to be) senior in highschool that wants to pursue entomology?

Good question! Here's some thoughts off the top of my head, and I know some other entomologists follow me so they're very welcome to chime in as well.

Most obviously, look around for universities to apply to that have strong entomology programs, which is unfortunately fewer and fewer these days, at least in the US, and most have been merged into broader zoology and biology departments, but there are still at least a few out there that offer ento degrees at least.

See if there are any natural history museums with entomology collections in your area that you could volunteer or intern at! Also things like insectariums, or other entomology-related non-profits.

There are many subdisciplines withing entomology to consider. There's taxonomy of course, but also medical entomology, agricultural entomology and integrated pest management, forensic entomology, insect ecology, and so on. Ideally you'll be able to explore all of these in undergrad if you go to a university that offers courses in each, e.g. my alma mater UC Davis, and figure out which one speaks to you and is something to potentially pursue in grad school.

Even if you don't want to be an insect taxonomist, it's always worthwhile to learn your basic insect taxonomy. I'm a proponent of insect collecting for this purpose but I know not everyone's comfortable with that these days. Getting specimens to view under a microscope and take through order and family level keys is in my opinion one of the best ways to get a fundamental understanding of the groups, but I know non-collectors that just spend hours each day browsing up and down the taxonomic trees on bugguide that know their shit pretty good.

There are of course people with entomology or adjacent careers that didn't go to university for the subject. I can't speak to that path other than to say I know it exists and of course they're welcome to chime in here too with their thoughts.

That's all I got at least as far as concerns a question as broad as that. Happy to answer more specific questions on more detail. Good luck!

[cnestus]

hi! I just found you from the post about your dog being a "lab assistant" and was scrolling through your blog.

I realised that you're an entomologist so I was wondering, whats your favourite bug and/or favourite genus of bugs?

also have a photo of my dogs

that is the most frequent and also most unanswerable question I get. I couldn't even pick a favorite insect order let alone genus or species. at the moment I'm slowly working my way through a big drawer full of unidentified crabronid wasps. prior to that I IDed several hundred histerid beetles, before that I was doing chrysidid wasps, bees of all sorts, also many shorter stints working on dozens of different highly diverse beetle, wasp, and fly families, meanwhile I'm always working on woodboring beetles and weevils. there's never any end to cool insect groups to learn about.

[cnestus]

Hello !! I was wondering, is AI gonna have a role in your field?

I don't think there's a single knowledge-based profession out there that isn't under threat of being automated by some pig ignorant dipshit beancounting middle manager with a hardon for AI and entomology is certainly no exception. even before the big AI explosion of the last couple years people have been trying for a long time to automate pest arthropod identification, but at least so far they haven't been successful. Especially when it comes to things like bark beetles, which I specialize on, the differences between a harmless native species and an intensely destructive exotic one can be unbelievably subtle, not to mention the fact that new/cryptic species are always being discovered and that's not something an AI would ever be able to detect or understand.

That doesn't mean that our jobs aren't still under constant threat even by an algorithm that would do a piss-poor job of imitating us; the executive perverts that get all hot and bothered by the idea of replacing humans with fancified autocomplete functions have a vested interest in not understanding the nuances of the professions they're killing and as long as it's good enough or even just appears to be good enough, they'll push for it.

Also let's not forget one thing about "AI" which is that half the time it's actually just a marketing term used to cover up the usual outsourcing/offshoring to cheaper workforces that has been ongoing for the last 30 years. My lab was recently and repeatedly pestered by someone selling "AI moth traps" that purported to be able to identify any pest species of moth that flew into it. When we pressed him on it it turns out that part of the service it offered was that the moths would be photographed by a little digital camera in the device and the pics sent to a team of entomologists in Hungary to confirm. Aside from the fact that a lot of small moths need to be carefully examined under a microscope and often even have their genitalia dissected by an expert to be confirmed as a particular species, this is no different then any of the other supposed AI products that have been revealed over the last couple years as just being a shiny veneer over the same old digital sweatshops on the other side of the world.

More importantly though, even if the AI moth traps did work as advertised either through the ~*magic of machine learning*~ or desperate poorly paid eastern european entomologists either way it's yet another thin edge of the wedge designed to put me and my colleagues out of a job by convincing our bosses or our bosses' bosses that there's a cheaper and more efficient alternative and I view them and literally anything else marketed as AI as part of the same anti-human push to deskill and demoralize as much of the workforce as possible. I've never once used chatGPT or any other LLM, I've never used an AI image generator, and I will never, ever fucking use any purported AI entomology tool because aside from being shined up dogshit it is an existential threat to the discipline I've dedicated almost 20 years of my life to.

[cnestus]

ant dicks like those of many other insects are basically a series of different claspers designed to grab and manipulate the female's gaster and genitalia and as this male carpenter ant is demonstrating they can grip things quite powerfully.

if you'd like to know more here are two papers that go into detail about the mechanics of hymenopteran sex, the second of which was written by one of my best friends.

now, how this particular ant ended up with someone else's leg lodged in his formicidussy is a mystery that will sadly remain as such.

Sir why are gripping someone's leg with your penis