Me and Entomology

I'm a real insect freak (some people would say it holds true when you remove "insect," too). I like to catch them, watch them and draw pictures of them. When I was Secretary of Ricketts Hovse here at Caltech every hovselist had some form of insect drawings in it. Currently I haven't been collecting much since between my job and my someone, I don't have all that much free time.

In high school I caught them and gave them to the high school Science Olympiad team since a new event on insect identification had started up and we were trying to build our own collection so we could identify real specimens. I used to take the insect nets and killing jars with me every time the family went camping. Now, however, I have my own collection which I caught mostly after high school. Now that I don't have any of my own collection equipment here at college with me, my collection even includes a few origami insects I've folded.

All of the insects in my collection were collected in California. Down here at Caltech there area lot of big roaches. I used to go out hunting them down and stomping on them in the night. I, for one, am not afraid to pick them up and play with them either. I have actually been known to cook them to a crisp and eat them all except for the gut area which from stepping on them I knew to be quite disgusting. Although I'll never be doing that again because in one of my required biology classes here, Bi 11 (Organismic Biology), I got to dissect a nice juicy roach and see that even the "good" parts aren't. Enough of that.