Possibly the most common non-human resident in the average home is the long-bodied cellar spider. These innocuous beasties provide non-toxic, round-the-clock pest control for just the price of a small place to live. And although there are those who'd be less than thrilled by these little guests, they keep actual pest populations in check. This episode discusses how you can document the guests in your home and share them for posterity and science.

The episode art is modified from a photo uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Ryan Hodnett.

I recorded this back in January and am finally getting around to launching it today. This episode features a fascinating little beetle larva that clings to rocks in rivers and in wave-washed lake shores. Water penny beetle larvae were first mis-described as isopods and later the error was fixed. You can find them on river rocks where they graze on periphyton. The episode art is from photos taken by then UVM student Erin Hayes Pontius when she worked in the lab at St. Michael's College. It shows a water penny (genus Psephenus) on the left and a false water penny (genus Ectopria) on the right.

The winter season ha provided some wonderful snowflakes. IN this episode I discuss a Vermonter know as "Snowflake Bentley". Wilson Bentley attached a bellows camera to a microscope and made some of the first snowflake photographs ..... thousands of them. And while he made scientific studies of snowflakes, I'm just having fun, and you can too.

Episode art is a photo I took using a Nikon Dipahot inverted microscope from the 1980s.

Upcoming bug talks:

March 7 & 9 in the Flower Show in Essex Vermont: https://vnlavt.org/vermont-flower-show/workshops/

March 19 in Newport Vermont: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/turning-stones-discovering-the-life-of-water-tickets-1242151802479