Leptoglossus: A holiday houseguest
by This time of year in the Northern US, most true bugs are hard to find. They are doing their best to conserve energy, hiding out in …
Bug Blog
Ecology / Entomology / Plants / Teaching
Bug Guides
When I tell people about Bugs in our Backyard, they often ask how to identify the common host plants, like the golden rain tree. Thankfully, it is …
The beak of a bug
What makes any bug a true bug? Insects in the order Hemiptera evolved from a common ancestor with a unique feature that all “true bugs” share today: …
Schools get involved
In the last week of October, we had our first submissions of field survey data from citizen-scientists. Julia Dooley, a teacher in Newark, Delaware, is …
Acknowledging NSF
Bugs in our Backyard is a project that’s been in the works for many years. I lived and worked in the DC area for 4 years, …
Hatching
Many animals hatch from eggs, including most insects. As you might expect, the size of the eggs an animal lays depends on who big the …
Bug or true bug?
If you’re talking about insects, when is it okay to call one a “bug”? People in everyday life call almost anything a bug, including spiders, centipedes, roly-polies and snails (none of …
What’s polyphenism?
Most animals grow to a relatively consistent adult size and shape. For example, people have a range of heights that falls across a roughly bell-shaped …
Host plants
Let’s take a moment to define a term that’s used frequent on this site. A host plant is a plant that supports the existence of …