Bug Squad

They met the mantids, walking sticks, beetle-mimicking roaches, Madagascar hissing cockroaches, tarantulas, silkworm moths, a butterfly, a dozen caterpillars and a chrysalis. It was a great day to get acquainted with insects and arachnids and learn how to raise them.

Interest in silkworm moths soared high at the recent UC Davis Bohart Museum of Entomology open house on Arthropod Husbandry: Raising Insects for Research and Fun.

Some people are born good-looking. Some have the gift of gab. And some are lucky enough to be born smarter than the rest of us. Whether we like it or not, Mother Nature does not dole these characteristics out evenly.--Simon Sinek How true. That applies to butterflies, too.

Today was a good day on the University of California, Davis, campus.

Doctoral candidate and forest entomologist Jackson Audley of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, targets an invasive bark beetle that's about the size of a grain of rice. The beetle? The walnut twig beetle, Pityophthorus juglandis.