What was the Question? (AKA: Who cares)

I was talking with someone the other day, and something happened that doesn’t happen to me very often. I was stumped.

Typically, I can answer a question partly or at least explain some reasoning behind my non-answer. If I’m totally at a loss, I always fall back on the simple: I don’t know, let me look it up for you. I actually like getting questions I don’t know the answer to because that means I get to look it up and learn something new. Not this time.

I was asked how I handle difficult identifications. If you know me, my superpower* is identifying insects (or other arthropods) from fuzzy pictures with no size reference and only part of the sample, like a few wings and a leg remaining from when they stepped on it and crumpled it up in a paper towel. I can usually get pretty close to at least the family level.

Here’s the thing: all the ID’s I get are challenging. Even the “easy” ones are still challenging. So what do I do? Great question, thanks for asking.

For me, it’s all about narrowing it down. Sometimes that can happen pretty quickly, like when I get a perfect picture of a brown marmorated stink bug. Other times, I have to start with: is this an insect (or other arthropod)? Most of the time, I can tell what order it is. It’s pretty easy to determine a beetle from a fly, so I can eliminate all things “not beetle”.

It’s also really helpful (to get down to family level and below) to know where the picture was taken. I work with people from the state of Georgia to the country of Georgia. Some pests we have are found across the world. Many others can be very specific to certain regions.

When I get to a stage where I’m getting stuck, then the resources come out! I’ve got plenty of textbooks and other entomology books to page through. There are great websites like BugGuide, Forestry Images, and straight up google-ing. That sounds really easy until all you have for keywords are “black beetle”. Trust me, you’re not going to get far with that.

It sounds pretty easy until you remember that there are millions of species of insects. Some estimates run into the billions. Then add in the spiders, scorpions, and other arthropods and you add to that number.

But what does it really matter? Customers just want it dead and want to know how to kill it. If it were that easy, all of our pest problems would have been solved years ago and we’d all be out of a job. But that’s not how it works. Knowing species (or close to species) tells us where it may be coming from, what it likes to feed on, what habitats it needs, what products work best. That way we can quickly target certain areas instead of having to look everywhere for everything.

And that’s a perfect reason to have your very own fractional entomologist giving you all those helpful resources instead of having to use a lifeline and wasting lots of time searching. That’s what we’re here for. Contact us.

Lagniappe – almost every urban entomologist has to do this regularly.

*My kryptonite as many of you know is ants!

Urban Pest Consulting