You know you really love entomology when:
your wife calls you to deal with a spider/bug/critter in the house and you show up with a camera.
you really enjoy the restaurant where you got to watch a jumping spider stalk flies and finally catch one.
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You find yourself fishing insects out of the municipal swimming pool in a town you are visiting, depositing them on the edge, only to be disappointed when the beautiful beetle you save flies away before you can get your camera.
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That is exactly me!! 
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When you carry soda glass collection vials with you everywhere. And you see a bug on someone and say “Hang on a sec”, reach into your pocket and grab a collection vial and catch the bug for a photo session later.
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I sometimes pocket them for safekeeping. ex: cucumber beetle on plant. i go to take it off. someones probally going to freak out over their squash. just way easier to just pocket the cucumber beetle and bring it to your room and let it have all the food it wants there.(entomology lover trying to solve problems)
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Me with tomato horned worms: put them in this little mesh environment, they can have all the bird-bitten tomatoes they want (Apparently those caterpillars love it), add a branch every now and then, but no way am I killing it! I am naming it and growing it to a moth (I actually succeeded once with a beauty named Mona. She was over five inches long as a caterpillar!!)
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You finally fell asleep after a rough night, only to be woken up again by your screaming brothers, who have a little emergency for you: they found a cockroach. You try to tell them to take it out, you try to make them wait (The poor little thing doesn’t want to go anywhere!!). It doesn’t work. So you get out of bed, still in your pajamas, let the cockroach crawl onto your hand, slip into some sandals that happened to be by the door, and take it out to the compost bin in shorts and a T-shirt (Yes, it was maybe 5ºC!!). Your brothers tell you that they have “bugaphobia” and you roll your eyes because these are the same kids who picked up slugs, earwigs, beetles, and other insects when you were little.
Oh, well. All in a day’s work!
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…you feel personally offended when someone calls all bugs “just bugs.”
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…you are crouched on a sidewalk at sunset, carefully photographing a tiny beetle crawling across a patch of moss between the bricks, whispering encouragements while nudging a stray pebble out of its way, when a jogger slows down, glances at you, and gives a slow, unimpressed side-eye, followed by a cyclist who nearly crashes but manages a perfectly judgmental double side-eye, while a passerby pauses mid-text to shake their head subtly, and you continue narrating the beetle’s heroic crawl. ;)
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You’re hurt by the section titled invertebrates, on this comic (Tom the Dancing Bug) that I spied a few days ago.
Appropriate response? C’mon!
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Is that for real?? Those ideals are just not right.
And stomping on ladybugs, for the record, is not a good idea, even if you are feeling selfish. Especially if you are feeling selfish, because they are very helpful to gardeners, and even those who just don’t want nasty aphid issues around them.
I can’t even kill an ant unless it is biting me, and even then, it is an impulse and I feel bad afterwards.
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I’m with you. That is a Western morality but it certainly is not global.
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Just think of all the seafood that would suddenly be off the human menu!
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Just make sure you don’t pat it on the head!!
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This hurts my soul in ways I Don’t understand. I get why some people would step in a roach or spider, but most other species are inexcusable.
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I don’t get why you would step on a roach. When they are squashed, they release a scent that attracts other roaches to the area because it basically means “This roach found food!!”
You know you really love entomology when, at every chance you get, you tell people about this fact in hopes that less roaches will be squished because really, this was their world before it was ours, and they aren’t even trying to harm us, they just want to live too.
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I think the cartoonist is making an ironic statement pointing out what people (in my society) often feel and do, not a statement about what we should do.
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Yes, I agree completely. But sadly, it’s accurately conveying the attitude (more or less) that most people seem to have towards most insects and many invertebrates.
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Noooo!
Oh, ‘those’ roaches. Sorry, family issues there.
Did I ever mention that my mother’s maiden name was the Ukrainian word for mosquito?
So I’m really a cross between a roach and a mosquito. (I’m a purebred pest.)
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I once attended a university where the math department had a professor named Mrówka, who told me he left Poland to get away from the meaning of his name. He wouldn’t tell me what it means.
I don’t step on roaches (although I did once by accident in the dark). I scald them or freeze them. And if I recognize a Parcoblatta, I leave it alone.
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