Everyone send their best wishes to my girl Peaches, she's off to her oncology appt tomorrow with suspected lymphoma. We think we caught it pretty early and can use all the good vibes that oncology has a treatment plan for us to keep her happy and healthy. She's been with me through so much 🥰🥹

Bonus isopod content: they often form these little huddles around the food (cat food in this case) and it also is WAY too cute

Quick question, why are isopods so dang cutie? The way they hold their little antennae when they eat gets me all 🥹😍🥰😭 #bugsky #isopod #rolypoly

And they're all sorted! Ended up dumping like half my stash because there is no way my buddies need ONE MILLION first instar nymphs to trian folks on 🤣🤦‍♀️

Playing bobbing for SLF this friday evening 🍎 (cleaning up specimen to prep for training purposes)

Only the real ones know where I'm at based on this ant! #bugsky

PROFESSOR Hayes sure has a nice ring to it! Proud to announce I will be joining Virginia Commonwealth University as an ecology faculty over in the School of Life Sciences and Sustainability. Moving to Richmond at the end of next month 🥰🕺🥳 Hit me up if you need RVA samples for a project! 🧪 #bugsky

A beautiful Vespula doing her thing 😍 #bugsky

Aaah!!!! 🥳 I have always wanted to find a warty leaf beetle in person!!!! Checking another off my bugket list! #bugsky

Revisited one of my go to grad school dinners and it still slaps. Rice topped with vegan orange "chicken" nuggets, edamame, and raw cabbage. Comes together in ad long as it takes to cook the rice! Added some roasted carrot and a jammy egg. 😋

I know I've become a fly guy (aka Drosophila wrangler) bc now I find the larvae cute, when they used to be one of the few inverts that squicked me out. Look at their cute lil mouth hooks! #bugsky 🧪

"BYOBeetle at your own risk, bare handed handling may result in some STONKY hands that take days to de-stinkify" ~ ask me how I know 🤦‍♀️

Who likes corydalids? I like corydalids! This big beauties are also known as hellgrammites, they're pretty bitey but luckily I avoided the chompers for a nice little photo op Went to a biopblitz today and we found this big larva looking for a spot to pupate

VERY excited to add these cocoons to my little eclosion station! Looking forward to some giant silk moths in my future 😍🥰✨️

Some uplifting graffiti I saw near campus today 🥰 #transrights #transrightsarehumanrights

Mine doesnt give me %, here is what it looks like on my end:

Check out the firefly larvae I found yesterday (two different specimen) iNat really wanted me to ID them as isopods 😢😜🤣

Bought myself an insect themed watercolor course. I'm gonna try to carve out time to enjoy hobbies this year, and will try to post my resulting paintings on here! Here is the instructor's instagram if anyone is curious: www.instagram.com/nussay_art/

Just wrapped up an on campus interview and stopped in my tracks when I recognized this sticker from @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social ! Always nice to see faculty repping cool merch on their doors, especially rad when its about embracing the diversity of life around us

A pleasant little surprise on my walk today while visiting my family home in Northern California- I reckon Eleodes sp. Gotta love a good beetle! 😍🪲

I rescued a bunch of caterpillars 🐛 last fall that were wandering around looking to pupate, but in an unsafe area and were getting stepped on.😭 My treat for enaging in this rescue mission was looking at this gorgeous female who just eclosed yesterday - Anisota sp. aka Oakworm Moth 😍🦋

I love pettin bugs - I put this little buddy in the sun to warm up after this video 🪰🌞 When I was a young (autistic) child, I would spend my recesses catching and petting insects, which I have since learned is not that uncommon of an origin story for us entomologists #bugsky 🧪

In Virginia, deviled eggs count as Latin food

Its been a minute since I've shared my cats, so enjoy this picture of Peaches in a long cardboard box and Saki sitting on a foot stool which we call his "special little pedestal".

We also looked at stomata on leaves by painting the leaf with clear nail polish and then peeling it off and mounting it on a slide, check out the two different plants my students prepped

This week in my intro bio course we looked at plant vascular systems and other transport structures - check out each photo's alt text for a description of what is going on with this celery! 🔬 I definitely compared the vascular bundles to Toad (from Mario) 🍄

The community college I adjunct at is always doing the cutest community events - wish I had some extra time for Fat Tuesday Pancakes today! 🥞

I am adjuncting at my local community college this semester and my students designed and executed an experiment on bean beetle preference 🫘🪲 We found that despite mung beans being what they were reared on, they preferred to oviposit on black beans, followed by black eyed peas! 🥚🫘

The weather had warmed up today, but there is still a lot of ice and snow in the ground. I saw this honey bee in this little melted crater today on a walk, I also saw several live ones flying around. Hoping this is a sign of spring soon to come 🐝🌱

You ever generate a large trash can worth of molecular waste? Cause I sure have 🤣 1,344/3,840 whole genome sequence libraries done ✅️🪰🧬