Imagine you’re floating idyllically down a Texas river.  You have to duck slightly to pass under a big tree growing nearly horizontally over the water.  Suddenly you notice a bunch of strange white patches, like chewing gum stuck all over the bottom of the tree trunk.  What is it? Such was the experience of Texas Forest Service entomologist Joe Pase recently on the Neches River in east Texas.  He snapped the photo you see here.  He and I were both puzzled as to its identity, though it definitely… Read More →

An email came in today from Brush Freeman, an entomologist on the Texas entomology listserve.  He linked to a couple of pictures he took recently of a wasp that builds its home out of the ultimate in recycled materials–bird poop. Now an insect using discards from other living things is not unusual.  Paper wasps (the inventors of paper, long before the Egyptians) tear off strips of wood from dead trees to chew up and turn into their pulp nests.  But the use of bird droppings as nesting material… Read More →