The 2022 Insect Fear Festival is coming. Run! Jump! Fly! One way or another or another, get to it on Saturday, February 26, 2022! The festival is organized by swarms of entomologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This year it begins with a special presentation by Ig Nobel Prize winner Justin Schmidt, creator of […]
The claim that “corporations are people” sometimes draws ridicule. A new paper suggests a related, maybe more accurate claim: “Corporate Insecthood,” Nina Strohminger and Matthew R. Jordan, PsyArXiv. February 14. psyarxiv.com/rxkhe. The authors, at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, explain: “Whether the corporation should be considered a person is a matter of active […]
It should be noted that the author of ‘The Physiology of Insect Metamorphosis’ (1954) was Sir Vincent Brian Wigglesworth CBE MD FRS [pictured] . . . . . . and not V. B. Wrigglesworth, as Cambridge University Press might suggest. (Neither was he V. P. Wigglesworth, as Google Books might have you believe) Research research […]
Dr. Joe Coelho, who is Professor of Biology at Quincy University, Illinois, US, is the author of ‘Insects In Fireworks’ a paper published in Ethnoentomology: an Open Journal of Ethnoentomology and Cultural Entomology, 2: 20–29. To clarify, the paper is not about the use of insects as ingredients in firework mixtures, but rather the […]
This insect-sex-reversal-centric profile of 2017 Ig Nobel Biology Prize co-winner Yoshitaka Kamimura appeared a year ago in the Keio Times: Sex-Role Reversal Research in Insects Wins Ig Nobel Prize for Keio Professor Yoshitaka Kamimura …In 2012, Prof. Kamimura was first invited to join a research team led by Kazunori Yoshizawa, an associate professor at Hokkaido […]
If you’re thinking of supplementing or replacing your plant-based cooking oils with oils made from insects, maybe steer away from Blaptica dubia – the Dubia Cockroach. Stick to mealworms or house crickets instead. That’s the take-home message from a new paper in-press at the Journal of Insects as Food and Feed which details recent progress […]
The Swedish and Hungarian researchers who won an Ig Nobel Prize (in 2016) for discovering why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses, and for discovering why dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones have published a new study, extending their work—to use painted stripes to protect human life. A report in Forskning, in Swedish, explains […]
The team that won the 2017 Ig Nobel Biology Prize for discovering a female penis, and a male vagina, in a cave insect has published a new paper, reporting a further discovery about the body parts of that insect. Their new paper is “A Biological Switching Valve Evolved in the Female of a Sex-Role Reversed […]
Building indirectly on Ig Nobel Prize-winning research, a 2015 study warns about the number of insects killed in collisions with cars, trucks, and other motor vehicles. The study is: “Road mortality potentially responsible for billions of pollinating insect deaths annually,” James H. Baxter-Gilbert, Julia L. Riley, Christopher J. H. Neufeld, Jacqueline D. Litzgus, and David […]
“Osbrink and Rust (1985) reported that there was no significant difference in the mean number of fleas collected from any particular area of the cat.” Ref. Osbrink, W.L.A., and M. K. Rust. 1985. Seasonal abundance of adult cat fleas, Ctenocephalides felis (Siphonaptera: Pulicidae) on domestic cats in southern California. Bull Soc Vector Ecol. 1985, 10, […]