1 December 04

Luring The Wild Entomologist

Simply offer a jar of grubs.

The listserv of the ecology graduate students at UC Davis evidently is a happening place. Recent emails have concerned offers of Swedish massage by a graduate of the ecology group who has since gone on to get massage training, and a note by a visiting Portuguese scholar/rockstar seeking temporary housing for winter quarter—a person with a keen ability to find a party every weekend, but someone who gets grumpy if he runs out of salted codfish.

My officemate, who is in the middle of a project growing valley oak seedlings for restoration plantings, posted the following in response:

Seeing as the list serve themes are eclectic today, I’m offering up
a jar full of grubs. They emerged from the valley oak acorns currently
sprouting all over my house.

While these grubs are not the life of the party, nor do they know Swedish
massage, they still might be of interest to budding entomologists who are
curious about oaks. Get ‘em while they’re hot!

You will have to figure out what they eat, or if they can be salted and
used instead of codfish.

There were no claimants via email, but this morning we got a call from a woman who was quite excited about the grubs. She’s an entomologist, and came over on her bike in a half-hour. She immediately concluded they were lepidopteran larvae, probably some gray moth, and wondered why they hadn’t pupated yet. She took the jar, and would be heading over to the entomology museum tomorrow. This will be fun, she said.

Posted by at 09:18 PM in Nature and Place | Link |
  1. GREAT post.

    — Chris Clarke    2. December 2004, 05:59    Link
  2. This is me what I read the blogs for! Thanks.

    — Dave    2. December 2004, 10:18    Link
  3. I want to be on a list-serv like that!

    The grubs-in-a-jar reminds me of one time when (for reasons that escape me) my parents ended up receiving a large jar of bats from one of my father’s co-workers. Since the bats arrived at about the same time as a holiday party my parents were hosting, releasing the bats into the evening air became part of the celebrations.

    — Rana    2. December 2004, 10:24    Link
  4. Hey, I got excited too! This is just what my Dad would have done. He once brought home a really promising pupa when he was living in Somalia, watched it harden and change colors a couple of times, and then came home one day to a thousand-odd praying mantes everywhere including in the bedsheets and underwear drawer.

    — Nicole    2. December 2004, 12:57    Link
  5. Overheard years ago in the halls of the Stanford Classics Dept:

    “Only someone who had been disappointed in love would become an entomologist.”

    You do get your pick of the litter, I hope …

    — Jarrett    2. December 2004, 18:42    Link
  6. An old jelly jar half-full of lively termites sitting on the kitchen counter. One of the first things my 19-year-old girlfriend (my now 49-year-old wife) found when I brought her home to visit my Dad.

    “What are you saving them for?” I asked.

    “Oh…” He looked mildly surprised at the question. “I just thought they’d come in handy sometime.”




    — dale    3. December 2004, 04:54    Link

Previous: Next: