Bug Squad

No contest, no winner, no beer?

You've probably seen California's state insect, the California dogface butterfly, on a first-class stamp, in a book, or on the UC Davis Bohart Museum of Entomology poster.

A winter pollinator garden does not buzz with bees; it crawls with earwigs, ants, roly-polys, and other insects. Turn over a rock, a pot, or a garden sculpture and there they are. Well, there one was. An earwig looked up as we lifted a garden sculpture.

If you're not big on bugs, you will be--or should be--after seeing UC Davis entomologist Gwen Erdosh's recent interview with reporter Ashley Williams on Good Day Sacramento. Erdosh, 21, an undergraduate entomology major and president of the UC Davis Entomology Club, is passionate about bugs.

You could say that entomologist Megan Meuti of The Ohio State University (OSU) messes with mosquitoes' circadian clocks. She's hoping she can trick Culex pipiens, the Northern house mosquito, into not biting us.