Andy Deans of NCSU rightly rakes ASU over the coals for their Ugly Bugs contest:
Denigrating insect species, broadly labeled here as
bugsdoes a disservice to those of us who fight daily to convince a skeptical public...
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Andy Deans over at the NCSU insect blog surveys the madness of state insects.
Arizona is thankfully immune to the bizarre tendency of states to pick imported species, as if the tens of thousands of naturally-occurring species weren't quite good enough. Ours is the two-tailed swallowtail (photo by…
I'm waiting for my PCR reagents to thaw, so in the meantime here are a few links for your perusal:
The folks at NCSU insect blog make fun of we ant peoples' curatorial habits.
Bug Girl takes on some anti-pheromone paranoia in California.
Carl Zimmer on the awesomeness of cephalopod camouflage.
Benoit Guenard notes that 2009 was a busy year for new ant genera
The NCSU insect blog has moved to a new URL: http://blog.insectmuseum.org/
Bug Girl blogs snow fleas
This is an amazing wasp
xkcd shows the difference between movie science and real science
Also, this:
What was the mystery?
It's a unique-headed bug in the enigmatic family Enicocephalidae. These soil-dwelling insects are predators of other arthropods. They are of phylogenetic interest as a potential sister lineage to the remaining Heteroptera, the true bugs.
Enicocephalids aren't terribly common…
Yes, and if you look at the intended educational outreach--the information page linked to each photo--it is fairly inaccurate (or should I say "buggy"?).
The aphid is identified as "Fighting from the order of: Hymenoptera." The carpenter bee isn't identified as an Hymenopteran--that line is left blank.
To me, the ugly thing about those images is the false coloration of the SEMs. Yep, the concept of the contest just seems kind of dumb!
That was exactly my reaction!
Just fyi, your sentiments are shared by those of us at ASU too...