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How Invasive Insects Travel by Hitchhiking
Whether you’re on embarking on a cross-country road trip or crossing state lines for a professional development workshop, you probably haven’t considered checking your vehicle for unwanted guests of the pint-sized, winged variety before crossing state borders. Invasive insects are nothing if not persistent — and sometimes they take creative liberties to get from one…
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From Here to There: Different Forms of Spider Travel
With eight legs at their disposal, it may come as no surprise that spiders can easily move from place to place. Some species can even travel up to 70 times their body length in a single second. While they can effortlessly glide from here to there by alternating the gait of all eight legs as…
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Insects, Climate Change and the Future of Pest Management
When you sit at the dinner table enjoying a colorful salad full of fresh produce, are you considering the impact that insects play in the loss of global crop production? If you’re not in pest management, probably not. But if you are, the numbers are staggering. Approximately 20% to 40% of crops produced around the…
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Why the Uptick in Insects After Natural Disasters?
Natural disasters can have consequences beyond displacing people from their homes and threatening their lives and livelihoods. Some types of natural disasters cause insect populations to grow exponentially — often the most undesirable species. Here we’ll examine which types of natural disasters bring the bugs out en masse and why extreme weather is frequently the…
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Will Cockroaches Outlive Humans?
A nuclear war, if it comes, will not be won by the Americans … the Russians … the Chinese. The winner of World War III will be the cockroach. — 1965 advertisement sponsored by the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy Cockroaches have an impressive win record. The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, which eliminated 80% of…
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Five of America’s Most Wanted Invasive Insects
With sightings of the Asian giant hornet (popularly called the murder hornet in the media) popping up across the northwest, we thought we’d take a look at some of America’s most notorious invasive insects. Unlike Asian giant hornets, these invertebrates already have a strong foothold in the United States and are responsible for millions of…
