About

This started out as a typical ranting blog over on Livejournal, but it turns out that, overall, I’m a happy sort of guy and don’t really have that many things to rant about. As of February 2007, it has instead turned into a project to document every arthropod that I can find on our property (about 9 acres on the north slope of Old Mill Hill in the Keeweenaw Peninsula of Upper Michigan). This includes insects, spiders, other arachnids, crustaceans, and pretty much anything I find with an exoskeleton. There should be at least one new arthropod every week, for as long as the variety holds out (which could be years). I’ll also randomly inject whatever thoughts happen to occur to me at the time, although I’ll try to stick with at least some connection to the topic at hand. When I run out of arthropods, maybe I’ll start in on the plants.

While I have always been interested in insects and other arthropods, I unfortunately have zero formal training in entomology (I am an extractive metallurgist by profession), so I’m basically trying to learn arthropod taxonomy as I go. I will doubtless make many mistakes, please don’t hesitate to correct me when I am wrong.

Incidentally, one of the big reasons why I am restricting pictures to things that are (or could be) on our property is that there are just so many kinds of arthropods that throwing it open to bugs from everywhere would absolutely swamp me. There are an estimated 350,000 species of just beetles worldwide. At one a week, that would take me about 6,700 years to get to them all. And that wouldn’t even touch, say, the moths! No, if I want to have any pretense of being comprehensive about this, I’ve got to restrict myself pretty heavily to a very small subset of arthropods, and the easiest way to do that is to focus on a very small area, like the house and back yard.

I’m also trying to make a few points: (1) Never mind Heaven and Earth, Horatio, there are more things living in your house than are dreamed of in your philosophy; (2) Just because an arthropod isn’t big and showy doesn’t mean that it doesn’t deserve attention too; and (3) It is possible to find interesting things wherever you happen to be if you look at sufficiently high magnification.

A note about the scale of the photographs: Most of the smallish insects are photographed on a sheet of graph paper with squares 1 millimeter across. For the ones that I photograph on a natural background or are too big to fit in the field of view of my macro lens, I try to give a length estimate somewhere in the posting. These photos are not what I would consider “artistic”, they are intended more to be functional and to show interesting details than to be things of beauty. So, don’t expect a lot of artfully posed pictures of showy butterflies standing oh-so-delicately on a perfect bloom - I have neither the skill nor the equipment for doing a lot of that. It’s more about the “See how the leg joins the abdomen here? And check out the extra eyes!” sorts of things.

The domain name is based on a comment made by the friend who is hosting this site. He wrote the following after reading six months worth of insect postings in one sitting:

“I just spent the last hour reading your livejournal blog, and getting up to
speed with the crawly, creepy, buzzy things that seem to be taking over your
house. And now, for some reason, I’m itching all over. And I’m a little
twitchy [. . . . . ] Okay, gotta go. Now it feels like something is crawling in my hair.”