Stories from the Home [Arthropod] Front
I have now finished sorting and identifying critters from 21 of the 50 homes sampled during the Arthropods of Our Homes project. I have seen some extremely interesting specimens, some of which I have...
View ArticleSo easy everyone can do it: How we’re like cave men and ants
**Today, we have a guest post from graduate student, Emily Meineke — Enjoy!** There was a time when people weren’t so connected. It was a big deal 500 years ago to cross the Atlantic, much less the...
View ArticleScientists seeking mites in their dorm rooms
“If you give me a ride to the museum, can I come vacuum your floors?” Amy Savage inquired as she popped her head into my office. My office-mate, Clint Penick, was shocked when I said, “Yes, please!” At...
View ArticleA love note to our citizen scientists
In honor of Valentine’s Day, we wanted to share our love and appreciation for YOU, our citizen scientists! Over the last year: 50 of you opened the nooks and crannies of your homes to entomologists in...
View ArticleIf you give an ant a cookie
**Today we have a guest post from Lauren Nichols about the School of Ants project. Enjoy!** When you start a large-scale project to map the diversity of ants across the United States, there is a...
View ArticleDr. Eleanor is on a roll!
Our Dr. Eleanor has been very busy these last few weeks. She’s written several new profiles for the Book of Common Ants. She had the brilliant idea to crowdsource a common name for the common ant...
View ArticleClimate data-loggers are now in homes across the country!
“We’ve got about a hundred temperature and humidity data-loggers, figure out how they work and get them into people’s homes.” And so began my first official challenge upon joining the Dunn Lab and the...
View ArticleReaching Out: Stories of Science Outreach
**This story was originally run in the March 2013 issues of The Signal, the monthly newsletter of the W. M. Keck Center for Behavioral Biology at North Carolina State University** February was full of...
View ArticleThat man is feeding a starling a banana! (and other tales from NYC)
This is a first in a series of dispatches from our team on-the-ground in New York City. Elsa Youngsteadt and Lea Shell are spending the next two weeks in the Big Apple looking at urban street trees and...
View ArticleManhattan Meet-ups
Elsa Youngsteadt and I have been setting up urban ecology experiments in New York City for the past week– we have another week to go (and are psyched two reinforcement researchers arrived on Sunday!)....
View ArticleSeeing the Future in the Trees
Over on the EcoIPM blog, Your Wild Life team member, Emily Meineke, has a new blog post describing her research on scale insects, small pest insects that spend most of their lives sucking the juices...
View ArticleScience Education Q & A with Andrew Collins
While in New York City in March, Elsa Youngsteadt and I met with Andrew Collins (check out his research here), a graduate student at Columbia University. We have been discussing some ongoing projects...
View ArticleWe’re excited about the NC Science Festival and think you should be too!
Today (April 5) marks the kick off the NC Science Festival, a statewide (as in 500-mile wide!) celebration of all things science in North Carolina. Our state’s science festival is special because it...
View ArticleTop 10 ways an ant’s house is similar to your house
Today, we have a guest post from ant biologist, Clint Penick. Clint joined our team back in January and has hit the ground running with research in NYC and North Carolina. He has a particular...
View ArticleHow teaching high school prepared me for NYC
In a former life I was a math teacher at a public high school in rural Mississippi. One day I put up a math problem about how to calculate the probability that you’d have to wait for a certain amount...
View ArticleCarpe Cicada!
As a kid, I never could sleep well on Christmas Eve. The anticipation of Santa’s visit (and the pile of wrapped presents he would leave behind) always had me so giddy that I could only doze off for a...
View ArticleTiny Tourists Invade the Big City
Today we have a guest post from Mary Jane Epps, post-doc and chief beetle wrangler at Your Wild Life. Recently, Mary Jane has begun investigating the associations between beetles and humans,...
View ArticleGoing on a Cicada Hunt
Last Thursday, cicada expert Dr. Chris Simon dropped by the Daily Planet Theatre at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences to talk about periodical cicadas. She had been working nearby in Greensboro, North...
View ArticleBuzzing about cicadas: Launching a new project!
Over the last few weeks, we’ve watched and envied reports and photos coming from those of you living within the emergence zone of Brood II 17-year periodical cicadas (from Georgia to Connecticut). We...
View ArticleThank you, Michael Pollan
“This isn’t a brave new world but one finally revealed.” –Jim Harrison Michael Pollan is a writer of great books about life and food. He has written seven books, but one of them in particular, The...
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