You Know You Really Love Entomology When:

Wow! What a coincidence!
Is she Ukrainian?

It isn’t as though the depicted attitudes towards people outside one’s own immediate family are any more admirable – it is critiquing the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the entire underlying value system of how we decide what is “deserving” of care and empathy.

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This is a fact more people should know. I had no idea this was a thing. As I myself am mortally terrified of house cockroaches, I sorta understand why people kill them. But as you said, these r just lil guys tryna live their lives. ;-;

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Yes. Well, her parents were born there. ‘Roach’ (Dad’s side) are actually of Irish descent.

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Cool! My dad is Ukrainian!

When you not only id the bird, but also the insect in its beak.

When you sprain your ankle on the new year the day before you have to travel, just to photograph a tiny planthopper (worth it)

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I was repairing the timber (again) on a badly chewed multi paned window frame(Sulfur Crested Cockatoos). I was repairing much of it with Builders Bog :heart: using an old plastic handled spatula with a broken end when a wasp(Genus Pison) decided it was a perfect nest site. Over the next two days I had to try and remember to use it quickly and put it back in roughly the same spot each time slowly moving it from one side of the window frame to the other as I worked. I witnessed seven white spiders? being entombed plus a territorial dispute as a smaller species of Genus Pison tried to deposit a small green spider in the second chamber of the handle (Genus Acroaspis). After a loud buzzing argument the larger wasp triumphant added the mismatched green spider to its nest and sealed it all up. My spatular is permanently jammed into a crack in the wall until the babies hatch.

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I admire your commitment to disturbing the wasps as little as possible, but I would probably have blocked the holes in the spatula and encouraged them to nest somewhere else (e.g., by providing nesting tubes or similar). Not because of the annoyance of having the tool be repurposed, but because plastic tends to trap moisture and the survival rate of the brood is likely to be lower than if the nest had been in a more appropriate material. Fingers crossed that you get to see the next generation emerge!

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When you are about to throw into recycling one of those (damn) clear plastic packages that virtually all small hardware (in this case, small screws) now come, and you notice that printed on the box’s interior cardboard back is something you immediately think of as, ‘Aha!’ – potentially very useful for bug hunting.

3 seconds of scissorwork later, and I have THIS to stick into my wallet.

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You have a massive callus over the joint of one big toe, where decades of dropping to one knee to examine insects has dug a crease in your leather boots into your toe in the same spot.

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manual focus lens on drone flies

and eat it came to mind