Entomology Quotes

“dear samantha
i’m sorry
we have to get a divorce
i know that seems like an odd way to start a love letter but let me explain:
it’s not you
it sure as hell isn’t me
it’s just human beings don’t love as well as insects do
i love you.. far too much to let what we have be ruined by the failings of our species

i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night
i know you would never DO anything, you never do but..
i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night

did you know that when a female fly accepts the pheromones put off by a male fly, it re-writes her brain, destroys the receptors that receive pheromones, sensing the change, the male fly does the same. when two flies love each other they do it so hard, they will never love anything else ever again. if either one of them dies before procreation can happen both sets of genetic code are lost forever. now that… is dedication.

after Elizabeth and i broke up we spent three days dividing everything we had bought together
like if i knew what pots were mine like if i knew which drapes were mine somehow the pain would go away

this is not true

after two praying mantises mate, the nervous system of the male begins to shut down
while he still has control over his motor functions
he flops onto his back, exposing his soft underbelly up to his lover like a gift
she then proceeds to lovingly dice him into tiny cubes
spooning every morsel into her mouth
she wastes nothing
even the exoskeleton goes
she does this so that once their children are born she has something to regurgitate to feed them
now that.. is selflessness

i could never do that for you

so i have a new plan
i’m gonna leave you now
i’m gonna spend the rest of my life committing petty injustices
i hope you do the same
i will jay walk at every opportunity
i will steal things i could easily afford
i will be rude to strangers
i hope you do the same
i hope reincarnation is real
i hope our petty crimes are enough to cause us to be reborn as lesser creatures
i hope we are reborn as flies
so that we can love each other as hard as we were meant to.”
― Jared Singer

“I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects...”
― Charles Darwin, Letters. A Selection, 1825–1859

“Virtue became less the harsh and martial self-sacrifice of antiquity and more the modern willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.”
― Bert Hölldobler, Edward Wilson

“Cars with flames painted on the hood might get more speeding tickets. Are the flames making the car go fast? No. Certain things just go together. And when they do, they are correlated. It is the darling of all human errors to assume, without proper testing, that one is the cause of the other.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“Entomologists use that word 'foul' often when referring to the flavor of a caterpillar. They are rarely more specific than 'foul' or 'tasty.' I expect that is because they are leaving the assessment up to birds, and birds have a very binary approach.”
― Amy Leach

“What she actually wanted was to see the world, the way Father had when he was a young man. She had found all sorts of geography books and atlases in the library---books about the Orient, full of steaming rain forests and moths the size of dinner plates ("ghastly things," according to Father), and about Africa, where scorpions glittered like jewels in the sand.
Yes, one day she would leave Orton Hall and travel the world---as a scientist.
A biologist, she hoped, or maybe an entomologist? Something to do with animals, anyway, which in her experience were far preferable to humans. Nanny Metcalfe often spoke of the terrible fright Violet had given her when she was little: she had walked into the nursery one night to find a weasel, of all things, in Violet's cot.
"I screamed blue murder," Nanny Metcalfe would say, "but there you were, right as rain, and that weasel curled up next to you, purring like a kitten.”
― Emilia Hart, Weyward

“She first peered into its fascinating cases of beetles and butterflies at the age of six, in the company of her father. She recalls her pity at each occupant pinned for display. It was no great leap to draw the same conclusion of ladies: similarly bound and trussed, pinned and contained, with the objective of being admired, in all their gaudy beauty.”
― Emmanuelle de Maupassant, The Gentlemen's Club

“You have your own category in entomology you are so beetle-brained.”
― Cindy Anstey, Duels & Deception

“. . . the great British entomologist Sir Vincent Wigglesworth (wonderful name for an insect man, I always thought) . . .”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History

“A very successful method of dragon-fly-catching..is to use a captured female dragon-fly as a decoy. One end of a long thread is fastened to the insect's tail, and the other end of the thread to a flexible rod. By moving the rod in a particular way the female can be kept circling on her wings at the full length of the thread; and a male is soon attracted. As soon as he clings to the female, a slight jerk of the rod will bring both insects into the angler's hand. With a single female for lure, it is easy to capture eight or ten males in succession”
― Lafcadio Hearn, A Japanese Miscellany: Strange Stories, Folklore Gleanings, Studies Here & There

“A most extraordinary device for catching dragon-flies is used by the children of the province of Kii. They get a long hair, - a woman's hair, - and attach a very small pebble to each end of it, so as to form a miniature "bolas"; and this they sling high into the air. A dragon-fly pounces upon the passing object; but the moment that he seizes it, the hair twists round his body, and the weight of the pebbles brings him to the ground.”
― Lafcadio Hearn, A Japanese Miscellany: Strange Stories, Folklore Gleanings, Studies Here & There

“Lavoisier's wife surely could have used a barf emoji, had she ever looked up the origin of 'helpmeet' and shared it with Charlotte Corday.

Lavoisier's wife's text: Can you even f**king believe this s**t? (Barf emoji here)

Lavoisier's wife's text back from bff Corday: OMG OF COURSE GENESIS, WTF”
― Amber Sparks, And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories & Other Revenges

“Corruption, in these bugs, is splendid.”
― William H. Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories

“Moths have the animal world’s most exceptional sense of smell and can capture separate scent molecules with their antennae.”
― Johan Eklöf, The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life

“No one knows exactly how many insect species there are in the world. It’s a question of millions and new ones are constantly being discovered. In Sweden and Norway alone, one-thousand-six-hundred completely new species of insect have been identified in the last decade. In the tropics, every insect eventually leads to new discoveries and many species presumably die out before we even have time to meet them.”
― Johan Eklöf

“As increasing human population and fires from the savannah are continuously eating into the forest belt, it seems likely that the distribution of the forest members of the fusca group will continue to retract. In 1912 Simpson described how G. Fusca was found in Sierra Leone along a certain 37-mile stretch of road which ran through thickly wooded country skirting mountains densely clothed in thick forest; in 1946 I visited the area to find no fusca, but bare mountains, grassland, and only a few patches of low secondary thicket.”
― T. A. M Nash, Africa's bane: the tsetse fly

“Some 200 miles south of Gadau, where the climate is less severe, morsitans still has to vacate log sites in the dry season and breeds in the riverine vegetation of stream-beds together with tachinoides and palpalis. Still farther south, and approaching the forest belt, morsitans breeds under small, deciduous, umbrella-like Gardenia erubescens bushes in the savannah, until the grass fires destroy the leaves when the female larviposits under small thickets of evergreen Combretrum micranthum in eroded, waterless gullies.
This seasonal shifting of the breeding grounds is not confined to West Africa. Recently Glasgow found that in a hot part of Tanzania morsitans breeds under logs in the wet season, but after the fires prefers rot holes in trees, returning to logs when the rains break. Burtt has found that pallipides breeds in the early dry season in deciduous thickets, but moves after the fires to evergreen thicket along the main watercourse. The wet-season site defeated him.
When investigating a strange area, forget past experience; instead, consider the climatic conditions prevailing and the vegetation available, and remember the basic principles. The tsetse is a most adaptable insect: pupae have even been found on the floors of native huts.”
― T. A. M Nash

“Skepticism does not disqualify you from being a natural scientist; instead, it is the praiseworthy habit of someone who does not submit to dogmas, even if they are currently supposed to be in fashion.”
― Josef H. Reichholf, The Disappearance of Butterflies