They stood hand-in-hand; arm-in-arm in the darkening and quiet laboratory. They stared at the door as the few bugs that remainined left the lab in their vials, safely snuggled in their plastic egg carton. “Are they really gone?” one Bug Night-er asked, “Will there be more?” The White Coats kept their gazes steady. Their faces […]
I am going to miss her, thought the White Coat male. She had been a challenging identification. Eight hairy but shapely striped legs. An abdomen that just wouldn’t quit. She should have been an easy ID. Yet here they were, the two of them at the end of Bug Nights, finishing the last few and […]
“Don’t pretend that we haven’t been intimate,” he said, “You have seen my palps, for heaven’s sake, no one has seen my palps like you have.” She was terrified. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The bugs were just supposed to be under the scope: small, legion, inert, dead. […]
“Those lines on the pavement are there for a reason, you know,” hissed the giant insect to no one in particular. It was doubtful that anyone could hear her; what with all the screeching of brakes, honking, and screaming. One could see her point, no one seemed to be parking in an orderly fashion. Back […]
“How will we get them to come back to Bug Night?” asked the male White Coat, “I worry about losing momentum and interest after taking off last week for that conference presentation.” The male White Coat wrung his hands. The things he worried about, the female White Coat thought. She was busy counting chocolate bars […]
They seemed like an odd trio. One was nattily dressed and sported a neatly trimmed beard. One appeared to be a banker in a sharkskin suit and was clean shaven. The other sported a timeless, segmented exoskeleton and antennae. They clustered at the back door of the laboratory building, shading their eyes to peer in. […]
We’ve all been there, he thought. A tough macroinvertebrate identification can pull you in and make you feel like you are drowning—except, this wasn’t happening in the St. Paul’s School laboratory. It was real. All that he could do was utter a guttural protest as the insect pushed him under for the third time. He […]
“But see, the brush-like labrum is clearly visible so it is definitely a Philopotamidae,” said the male White Coat. It was clear that the female White Coat was not convinced. “I can’t see any labrum,” she said but there was something there—it could have been detritus on the bug or her poor eyesight. Maybe it […]
“Wow, look at the crazy patterns of exoskeleton on my pedipalp,” said the Bug Night-er. She could not be blamed for a moment of distraction looking at her own morphology through the stereoscope. The one-hour warning had been issued by a White Coat and she had already identified over 700 chironomids and varying quantities of […]
“There’s not a lot of parking with these mountains of snow from the blizzard,” observed the nervous parental Bug Night-er. “Look, there are helpful drones to lead us to the larger parking lot across the road,” said the larvae, “I think I read about it in the Bug Night of the Living Dead flyer.” The […]
“It’s a shambles,” observed a Bug Night-er as she looked around the laboratory, “We should have done more to help Mr. White Coat—he has been alone with us all evening.” The sole White Coat did not hear this observation. He was running figure eights around the rooms while returning the appropriate ‘scopes to the upper […]