We have some great conservation efforts going on here at UNL! I am a Chinese Mantis, and am not endangered, but some of my fellow predators, like the Salt Creek Tiger Beetle, are not so lucky. They only survive on a tiny salt marsh near Lincoln, NE. Here is a great article about what the university is doing to save these important insects.

Hello everybody, my name is Drew Kendall.  I am a graduate student at UNL taking classes so that I can renew my teaching license.  I chose to take entomology classes as a combination of what was available and what was interesting.  Insects are all around us and I thought that by taking the class I could understand them better and help my future students understand them better.

Although, I have discovered something odd.  Nebraska, like other states, has a series of standards for the general ideas that should be taught and at what grade.  So with something as important as insects, you'd think they would be all over that right?  Not really.  The only time the word insect even shows up is in Life Science: Characteristics of Living Things: 3-5: "SC5.3.1.b Identify how parts of plants and animals function to meet basic needs (e.g., leg of an insect helps an insect move, root of a plant helps the plant obtain water)."

I substitute teach, or at least I did, I'll be a full-time teacher in the fall, so I've had a chance to talk to a few science teachers.  The amount of time they spend on insects varies from barely at all to a couple weeks, but they all told me basically the same things:
1.) "They aren't on the standards." (A sad commentary on how the Standards can stifle education, but you don't want to get into that argument.)
2.) "They need to know they are part of the Animal Kingdom and they are Arthropods."
3.) "Insects show up in food webs/chains as part of the flow of energy."

So basically everything a student needs to know by the time they graduate can essentially be summed up in the following sentence: "Insects are a form of insect, specifically a type of Arthropod, that can consume either a plant or an animal and in turn is consumed for food."

I think in the future, I'm going to spend more time on insects than just the minute it would take for my students to write that sentence down.  Maybe I'll keep the template for the pest profile and give it to them one day for a project.  :)

-Drew

Hi!

     My name is Kaitlin and I am freshman studying Advertising/Public Relations and Spanish. I'm taking this class to fulfill an ACE requirement. I decided to take Entomology 115 because I heard how great it was through a friend, and I am glad that I did. At the beginning of the semester I really hated insects, but now after learning how essential they are to survival-- I still think they are creepy-- I appreciate them much more. I also had no idea that some (although very few) insects live in the water. I didn't take this class with the lab (Entomology 116), but wish I would've because I think I could have absorbed the information better. I never knew how interesting insects could be, and how many different types there are. I think the classification system of insects is a great organization system, being an ADPR major I love when things are organized. I honestly couldn't see myself having a career in Entomology, but I respect those who do and I will think twice about squashing a bug next time I see one.

-Kaitlin VanLoon

I grew up in the middle of a corn field. Living on a farm you see many different creatures from spiders, mosquitos, and butterflies. It seemed that every year there was a new insurgence of some creature. One year it was grasshoppers. You couldn't walk outside in flip-flops in the grass without getting a grasshopper underneath your foot. Then one year we had toads everywhere. My cats and dog enjoyed playing with those. We had ones about the size of a quarter to about the size of my fist. But there was one year where we had the attack of the Asian Lady Beetle or Harmonia axyridis. This insect is not natural to the United States. It was brought in for pest control. They eat aphids that can be harmful to agriculture, but now they themselves have become a pest. They started becoming a problem in the 1990s. I remember being at home and seeing so many in the windowsill. It was typical to find them crawling on my walls or near my windows. I had a playhouse, but it was taken over by Asian Lady Beetle corpses. This goes to show some of the effects that biological control can have.

I would like to take this opportunity to share my thoughts and feelings about my experience this semester in Entomology. For one, this class was not something I was originally very interested in and looked at it more as a chore. I was pleasantly surprised how much I actually liked learning about insects. There were so many fascinating things we learned this semester. One of my favorite topics was the different systems inside of insects. Many of their systems are actually pretty similar to that of humans but they also have many differences. The fact that insects have three guts for example and can have multiple hearts was pretty cool to learn about.

Right now I am currently in Teachers College, on my way to hopefully become an elementary school teacher. I can use the material and knowledge I have gained to educate my future students. We should all really take the chance to learn more about insects because they are everywhere around us. Taking the ENTO lab along with this course really helped me to also become more comfortable handling and dealing with insects. At the beginning of the semester, I refused to touch any of the insects that we interacted with. By the end of the semester, I had no problems picking up and handling the insects and preparing my insect collection for the end of the year. While there are still many insects I have no desire to touch, my knowledge and experience with insects has helped me to better understand these small animals. I would highly recommend taking this course as well as the lab to any student at UNL. Like I said earlier, I had no desire or prior knowledge to entomology. But now that I have taken a semester to learn more, I have found how insects impact our lives and how important and fascinating they really are.

ENTO 115

Hello everyone!

My name is Hailey Walton and I am currently finishing up my Junior year here at UNL. I am in this class as a requirement, however I think that it is one of the more interesting and hands on learning experiences i've had this year! I am an Elementary Education student and at first I thought it was interesting that this class was a requirement. However, now I realize that a lot of the information learned here relates to information I learned back when I was in elementary school. For instance, when I was an elementary age student, I remember doing projects with rolly pollys and also with butterflies. For the butterfly experiment, we received caterpillars and then observed them over a period of time until they hatched into butterflies. Also, another connection I made between my major and this course was from a practicum experience I had earlier this year. I was teaching my 4th grade class during reading. The article that they were reading was about BT corn and the benefits and consequences from it. Each student then had to take a stance on this issue. Looking back on it now, it is interesting to see just how much of this courses information is really incorporated into reading and science lessons in the classroom today!

A couple of new articles that may be of interest:

Are bed bugs repulsed by certain colours?

Neonics 'not equally harmful' to bees