In another blog post, we discussed what many typical insects do to handle or avoid the ravages of winter. For the vast majority of insects, winter is a trying and dangerous time of year – a particularly deep freeze may reach them even deep in soil or under debris, a late spring may cause their […]

To finish off my series on names, I wanted to point out that part of the reason scientists often use scientific names rather than common names is that there are simply too many species to give each of them a scientific name and one or more common names. Especially among the species that are too […]

In our last post about insect names we discussed some of the pros and cons of common and scientific names. In this post, I want to walk through a case study that will illustrate in more detail how common name conventions work and why it can be important to get names right. As promised earlier, […]