Gwen Pearson on Muck Rack

Gwen Pearson

(She/Her)
Toledo
As seen in: Nature, The Guardian, The Washington Post, WIRED (UK), WIRED Magazine, Science Magazine, Inkl, Warwick Beacon
Covers:  Insects, entomology, science, ecology
Doesn't Cover: Things that are not science related; kickstarters
Entomologist. Educator. Writer. NERD. PhD/She/Her.
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Articles by Gwen Pearson

‘A little less alone’ - Warwick Beacon

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By Gwen Pearson
| Warwick Beacon Verified
To most, time seems an unforgiving concept, a leash we cannot elude. It is not until we have reckoned with our mortality that we are left to ponder an unequivocal truth: it is our art that is eternal and cosmic, bound to no age or limit. Julia Steinweh-Adler embodies this in her music, as her melodies and poetry seem to defy gravity and illuminate her timelessness. A native of Rhode Island, she spent her youth surrounded by an abundance of nature.
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A huge stick insect has been discovered in Australia. Here’s why that’s important

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By Gwen Pearson
| Inkl
The Acrophylla alta species of stick insect, discovered recently in the high altitudes of North Queensland, Australia. Photograph: Professor Angus Emmott/James Cook University Scientists recently announced they had found an enormous new stick insect in Australia. At 41cm in length and weighing 44g, the main question I heard was: “Why didn’t scientists notice something that big before now?” The short answer is: it’s a stick.
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LA's horror through an RI woman's eyes - Warwick Beacon

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By Gwen Pearson
| Warwick Beacon Verified
Editor’s note: The author grew up in East Greenwich and spent time with her grandparents in Warwick. She graduated from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in 2022 and now works for a nonprofit agency in the city. When I moved to Los Angeles in 2020 to complete my bachelor’s degree in journalism, I was buzzing on the energy the city vibrated.
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Learning at Home With Bugs

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By Gwen Pearson
| entomologytoday.org
With children home from school in many locations due to public health concerns, the ESA Education and Outreach Committee collaborated to assemble a list of handy insect-related activities for parents to keep their children active and learning. (Photo via Flickr/Insects Unlocked, public domain) By Gwen Pearson, Ph.D. Right now many of us are at home with kids, and school is canceled for at least the next month.
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Repellent Clothing Protects You From Ticks

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By Gwen Pearson
| WIRED Magazine Verified
Wave your hands in the air like you just don't care... that you carry several human and animal diseases. American dog tick (Dermacentor variabilis) questing. Photo © Alex Wild Hurray! After a very long, snowy winter, spring is finally here. Also, ticks. Lots and lots of ticks. Over 35,000 tick-related diseases are reported in the US each year. How do you balance the desire to run and scamper around outdoors against fear of ticks sucking your precious bodily fluids?
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Free eBook about Ants!

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By Gwen Pearson
| WIRED Magazine Verified
Tetramorium pavement ants fight to determine the territorial boundary between two colonies. Image © Alex Wild. Tetramorium pavement ants fight to determine the territorial boundary between two colonies. Image © Alex Wild. I love books. The only thing I like better than books are FREE books. And a FREE book, about bugs...Ecstasy. A great new book about ants was released today, free, for you to download. It's the product of a citizen science project that I'm a big fan of, The School ofAnts.
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New research on bedbug insecticide resistance

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By Gwen Pearson
Since I mentioned bedbugs recently, I thought I would also cover this paper: Kyong Sup Yoon, Deok Ho Kwon, Joseph P. Strycharz, Craig S. Hollingsworth, Si Hyeock Lee, J. Marshall Clark (2008).
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The PhD Question

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By Gwen Pearson
I get this question a lot. “Should I do a PhD? I want to work in _____.”  I get it so much, in fact, that I thought I’d turn this into a post, and let others chime in. My answer is usually “No”, and here’s why:  A PhD is NOT a vocational degree. NEVER get a PhD because you think it will improve your job prospects. PhDs are trained to do research in an academic setting, for the most part. And that is….not, frankly, where the majority of jobs are.
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DDT, Junk Science, Malaria, and the attack on Rachel Carson

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By Gwen Pearson
Some crazy claims have been made lately about Rachel Carson. How wacky are the claims? Well, this wignut says Rachel Carson is on a level with Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Here’s another one, who also adds that “massive testing has documented that synthetic pesticides are no cancer threat to humans.” Wow. Just…wow. Think this is a fringe issue? You can also read this stuff in the New York Times, Washington Times, and CBS news.
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Bedbugs and Pesticide Resistance

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By Gwen Pearson
I discovered that bed bug evolution–specifically resistance to pesticides–was also the subject of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center‘s podcast this month. A FASCINATING interview with one of the grand old men of evolutionary genetics, James Crow. He worked on DDT resistance back in the late 40s and 50s. There is also a wonderful accompanying article at Understanding Evolution.
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DDT, Junk Science, Malaria, and insecticide resistance

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By Gwen Pearson
Last week, I outlined four specious claims made by those attacking Rachel Carson and promoting DDT. (Visit that post to see links to articles in various national media outlets that swallowed these claims without any critical inspection. Sigh.) Today, I’ll deal with their third bogus claim: 3. Mosquito resistance is not an issue.
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Doctor Who’s Green Death Maggots!

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By Gwen Pearson
ScreenShot; image copyright BBC My favorite Doctor is definitely David Tennant. But I also love classic Dr. Who, and The Green Death is one of the best episodes. Well, the best for an entomologist, anyway. So I bring you: Giant Fanged Death Maggots that Spit Glowing Green Snot. Winning, indeed!  These episodes are from the 10th season of Dr. Who, in 1973.
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Noah's Extremely Bad Animal Husbandry Advice

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By Gwen Pearson
| WIRED Magazine Verified
The Proposed Ark Park. Ark Encounter is a proposed creationist theme park centered around a 510-foot "replica" of Noah’s Ark to be built in Kentucky. The park is based on a literal interpretation of a 6,000-year-old Earth and biblical global flood, and is financed in part by state tax breaks and municipal junk bonds. From the first announcement of the park in 2009, live animal displays inside a giant wooden boat were part of the plan. That's kind of what the story of the Ark is all about.
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Split Ends, Conditioners, and Head Lice

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By Gwen Pearson
| WIRED Magazine Verified
You’ve probably seen this headline over the last few days: “Regular conditioner effective at removing head lice!” Some newly published research did find that plain conditioner is as effective as special lice-removing products at removing lice eggs from hair. BUT, the research protocol doesn't have a lot in common with what the average parent might do. The researchers wanted to find a way to make their experiments as controlled, precise, and repeatable as possible.
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Hummingbird Banding Is Like Holding Magic

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By Gwen Pearson
| WIRED Magazine Verified
A month or so ago I visited the Southwestern Research Station in Arizona for a conference. While I was there, I had a chance to watch some hummingbird banding. While hummingbirds are lovely to watch at a feeder, they are even more wonderful up close. Click through the slideshow to learn a bit more about how hummingbirds are captured and monitored. The Hummingbird Monitoring Network monitors the Chiricahua Mountains as a major part of the migratory flyway of hummingbirds.
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Can Stick Insects really mate for 1400 hours?

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By Gwen Pearson
I saw this tweet a while back, and it made me awfully curious: Is that true? Because that seems like not a very smart thing to do, if you are a large and tasty insect. Or, in this case, two large leaf-eating insects belonging to a group that specializes in being invisible to predators by looking like a stick. Two sticks having sex is the sort of thing I’d notice, anyway. The risk of predation while you are making out–or more literally “hooking up” in the case of insects–is a major issue.
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How to Make Your Bug Info Invasive (on Social Media)

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By Gwen Pearson
| entomologytoday.org
A few simple changes behind the scenes of your website can help your entomological info perform better on Google and social media. (Photo credit: Flickr/esthervargasc, CC BY-SA 2.0) By Gwen Pearson, Ph.D. You’ve built a spiffy website about your insect research, or written a new extension bulletin about the latest pest. But for some reason, it looks weird on Facebook, and never shows up in Google Search. Why not? The reason may lie behind the scenes, in the code of your website.
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Google Honors Grace Hopper...and a "bug"

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By Gwen Pearson
| WIRED Magazine Verified
The December 9th, 2013 Google Doodle Honors Grace Hopper's 107th Birthday...and has an entomological surprise at the end. Image © Google. The December 9th, 2013 Google Doodle Honors Grace Hopper's 107th Birthday...and has an entomological surprise at the end. Image © Google. Today's Google Doodle honors Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, Admiral of the Cybersea. The doodle also contains a little Entomological (Etymological?) surprise at the end: a moth.
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Is LinkedIn useful for biologists?

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By Gwen Pearson
A lot of people asking about LinkedIn are actually motivated by this question:  “where online should I look for a job, or best position myself to find a job?”  If what you want is for people to find you and offer you a job out of the blue … Um, that’s not gonna happen. The vast majority of jobs are filled informally. People hire who they know, and who their connections know. What you need to do is build up your network.
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This Wasp-Eating Falcon Laughs at Your Puny Stings

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By Gwen Pearson
| WIRED Magazine Verified
Wasps really, really don’t want you to bother them. They sting. They bite. They use chemical signals to summon relatives to come help drive you off. And yet, one amazing bird in Central and South America not only eats wasps, but specializes in feeding them to its babies. Even more strange? It’s a falcon. Falcons are best known as fast-flying predators of small birds. Red-throated Caracara (Ibycter americanus) are falcons about the size of a big crow, found in neotropical forests.
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The Mad Hatterpillar

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By Gwen Pearson
| WIRED Magazine Verified
It’s the Mad Hatterpillar! These caterpillars are native to Australia and eat eucalyptus trees. As you can see from this photo, these caterpillars (Uraba lugens, larvae of a Gum Leaf Skeletoniser moth) have a strange attachment to their heads. It’s a stack of their shed head capsules! Where do they get all these extra heads, anyway? Moths and butterflies are just flying gonads that make new caterpillars.
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With Apology to Edgar Allen Poe

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By Gwen Pearson
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of entomological lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping– Something crap, crap, crapping in my bedroom wall. ‘Tis the wind ,’ I muttered, Only this, and nothing more.’ Deep into the darkness peering, long I laid there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming damage I never dared to dream before.
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Google just changed the snippet length!

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By Gwen Pearson
| naturegeek.me
Just as we all got used to writing short, pithy snippets for our content, Google changed it’s mind about just how many characters it will display in search results. In the past Google displayed a description of about 160 characters; now that’s been bumped up to 360 characters. This might be good news; it gives writers more space to explain why you should read their information. Here’s a brief overview of why you should learn to love your metadata, even if you aren’t a code-wonk.
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Google “Promoted” search results are…..terrible.

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By Gwen Pearson
| naturegeek.me
WSJ has a new long, wonky article about web traffic that is just the sort of thing I love. And, like a lot of news about our online ecosystem, it’s a bit depressing. When you search in Google, it often puts “featured snippets” or “knowledge cards” at the top of the search results. You may also see a list of similar questions under “People also ask.” The problem is that the answers are sometimes bogus, and sourced poorly.
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How to Talk to a Reporter About Entomology

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By Gwen Pearson
| entomologytoday.org
A great example of a photo that creates curiosity in the reader. Researchers that provide a host of images or video to accompany a press release or media pitch often go to the top of a reporter’s pile. (Photo credit: Doug Walsh, Ph.D., Washington State University) My first experience with media coverage of my research was mortifying.
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Bad Beetle Karma

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By Gwen Pearson
I realized after my interview last weekend that I had never actually covered Japanese Beetle Bags on my blog!  That omission must be remedied! I’m sure you’ve seen them–they are for sale all over. The sad truth is that they don’t work. Sure, they fill up the bag-o’-death in a really satisfying way, but they also attract many, many more beetles into the area that don’t get caught.
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Contact me! | Gwen Pearson

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By Gwen Pearson
| naturegeek.me
Contact me! Please note that I will not provide any diagnosis via the internet. If you send me unsolicited photos of your body, I will post them publicly with your name and email attached. Threats will be reported to the police. I’m sorry if that sounds unfriendly, but being an easily identified woman on the internet is not always a positive experience.
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Bees, pesticides, and CCD: what’s the evidence? | Bug Gwen on WordPress.com

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By Gwen Pearson
In the last few months, there’s been a steady stream of new publications about honey bees and pesticides. One news item ran with the headline: Mystery of the Disappearing Bees: Solved!” Um. NO. Not even close. I got a bajillion emails about this paper from a Harvard researcher: This paper claims two things we’re already conditioned to think are evil cause CCD:  high fructose corn syrup and pesticides. It’s from a big name, widely respected university. It is also, sadly, a flawed paper.
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Gwen Will Not Diagnose You

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By Gwen Pearson
I get many, many emails from people. Some of these emails (and comments) say things like “I think I have a dangerous parasite” or “worms are coming out of my skin” and requesting my help in diagnosing their illness. I am sympathetic. But: I will not diagnose you over the internet. My first advice will always be “SEE YOUR DOCTOR.” Seriously.
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Want to repel mosquitoes? Don’t use citronella candles

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By Gwen Pearson
| Science Magazine Verified
By Gwen PearsonFeb. 16, 2017 , 9:30 AM Citronella candles are great for setting a mood, but they’re not so great for the very thing they’re advertised to do: repel mosquitoes. That’s one conclusion from a new study that tested 11 types of repellents on Aedes aegypti mosquitoes—the vectors of Zika, yellow fever, dengue, and other diseases. To find out which ones worked best, scientists developed a lab test designed to mimic the conditions on someone’s backyard patio.
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Want to repel mosquitos? Don’t use citronella candles

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By Gwen Pearson
| Science Magazine Verified
Citronella candles are great for setting a mood, but they’re not so great for the very thing they’re advertised to do: repel mosquitoes. That’s one conclusion from a new study that tested 11 types of repellents on Aedes aegypti mosquitoes — the vectors of Zika, yellow fever, dengue, and other diseases. To find out which ones worked best, scientists developed a lab test designed to mimic the conditions on someone’s backyard patio.
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Ask an Entomologist: Snow Fleas | Bug Gwen on WordPress.com

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By Gwen Pearson
If you’ve seen a tiny assortment of purple, bouncing specks in your snow, you might be looking at springtails. Don’t worry, they aren’t real fleas–they just bounce around in a similar way. Also, they are probably the cutest dang little things you’ve ever seen! Their tiny size is why you probably don’t know the earth is covered with these little fellows. The biggest ones are about 3mm–so you have to get very close to admire their cuteness.
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Glowworms harness a surprising ingredient to keep their threads sticky

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By Gwen Pearson
| Science Magazine Verified
This isn’t a photo of the Milky Way; it’s a deep, dark cave in New Zealand. And those blue things aren’t stars; they’re maggots. A chemical reaction in their Malpighian tubules—structures analogous to kidneys—makes their posteriors glow, much to the delight of more than 200,000 tourists who visit them every year.
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Sticky: New Animated Film Will Break Your Heart

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By Gwen Pearson
| WIRED Magazine Verified
The critically endangered Lord Howe Stick insect (Dryococelus australis) is one of my favorite bugs. It's hard not to love an insect this big and lumbering. (“Big” in this case means “a 15cm huge freakin’ insect.”) They look like the sort of thing evolution came up with after several pitchers of margaritas. Lord Howe Stick Insects also have a fabulous nickname: "Tree Lobsters." Despite their size, they are gentle plant-eating giants.
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Does your social media need an audit? | Gwen Pearson on WordPress.com

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By Gwen Pearson
| naturegeek.me
I was asked to do a workshop on social media for the IECC’s 2016 Conference, and thought I would write up what I did for everyone else to use. Running social media accounts takes a substantial investment of time and energy for staff. Before you get started: What do you want to accomplish? Your followers and likes are increasing over time. Great! Lots of followers isn’t meaningful if that doesn’t also connect to some real goal or metric for your organization What do you want to accomplish?
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ICE Insect Expo 2016 (with images, tweets) · bug_girl

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By Gwen Pearson
| storify.com
Are you sure you want to delete your account? You'll lose everything, forever! Of course not!
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CDC Warning on Misuse of Pest Strips

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By Gwen Pearson
| WIRED Magazine Verified
Image: Black County Museums/ Every week, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) publishes a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). It's meant mostly for doctors, public health practitioners, epidemiologists, and other scientists. It's not something you read over dinner for light entertainment. Unless, you know, you're a bug nerd like me.
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One Scientist’s Crazy Bet to Save the Bees: Join Monsanto

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By Ben Paynter Verified, Sarah Zhang Verified, Gwen Pearson, Hannah Nordhaus
| WIRED Magazine Verified
In Their Struggle for Survival In Their Struggle for Survival Against Killer Mites, Bees Get an Unlikely Ally: Monsanto “Make a fist,” says Jerry Hayes, waving his own in the air. “Now put it someplace on you.” About 150 people, the audience at a honeybee panel at the 2014 South by Southwest Eco conference, place their fists on their shoulders or collarbones. “Proportionally, this is how large a varroa mite is compared to a honeybee’s body,” Hayes says.
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Alien Moths Are Coming for Your Nuts

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By Gwen Pearson
| WIRED Magazine Verified
An important message about transporting your wood, brought to you by DontMoveFirewood.org. Invasive species threaten wood and nuts all around the globe. Here in the U.S., you can Kiss Your Ash Goodbye thanks to the Emerald Ash Borer, and the Asian Longhorned Beetle likes to munch on a variety of hardwoods. In the UK, it’s an invasive moth species that’s making chestnuts shrivel up.
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Tick season is here, and it’s time to learn how to stop the suckers

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By Gwen Pearson
| The Washington Post Verified
Worried about ticks? There are good reasons. Ixodes scapularis, the blacklegged or deer tick, transmits Lyme disease, a bacterial infection that can affect the nervous system and joints. But there are a host of other tick-borne diseases as well, and in some cases, they can make you pretty sick.
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When Crime Scene Evidence Crawls Away

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By Gwen Pearson
| WIRED Magazine Verified
Regular watchers of CSI and other forensic shows might be surprised to learn that forensic entomology is actually a branch of applied ecology. Decomposition is a critical ecosystem service that humans get for free and often take for granted. Necrophagous animals (“death-eaters;” with apologies to Harry Potter) are critical to the Earth’s healthy functioning.
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Bug Gwen's Annex

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By Gwen Pearson
About Spill over for things that are too long for twitter and too short for WIRED. My regular gig is here: WIRED Science
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Favorites and Things that make me smile

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By Gwen Pearson
| storify.com
Are you sure you want to delete your account? You'll lose everything, forever! Of course not!
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Bees, CCD, and Cell phones: Still no Link.

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By Gwen Pearson
Once again, the media is going bonkers over a bee paper, and making claims way out of proportion to any actual results. Here are some sample headlines: I do not know why people are so determined to prove that cellphones harm bees. OMG RADIATIONS IN MAI BEEZ!!! A preprint of a paper that has not yet appeared in a journal (!) was released this week. It is a preliminary study, and reports results of a bunch of *unreplicated* experiments. Very. Bad. Science. Reporting.
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Bees, Cell phones, and BS (again)

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By Gwen Pearson
The interwebs are all abuzz (ha!) with a new report that cellphones might be responsible for the losses in honeybee populations. Specifically, the news stories reference this paper: It’s a peer reviewed paper…but frankly, I think the journal editor has a lot of questions to answer about letting this paper be published. There are many things wrong with this paper that make me discount all of its findings. A short list: 1. They tested only FOUR hives–and each hive had a different treatment.
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Painfully Punny Insect Songs

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By Gwen Pearson
| storify.com
Are you sure you want to delete your account? You'll lose everything, forever! Of course not!
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A Ribald Tale of Love and Lice

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By Gwen Pearson
You may have heard that I told a story at the ScienceOnline2012 conference. If you missed it, here you go! Listen to the (Slightly NSFW) Story  via The Monti Everything I said is true; there are even photos. (Think carefully before you click this link. You’ve been warned.) There are still pubic lice out there, even in a world of Brazilian waxing. Here’s a recent paper from the New England Journal of Medicine. Can you spot the crabs?
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Roaches with JetPacks

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By Gwen Pearson
You might have noticed a lot of news lately about robot designs based on insects. Insects are great models for robots because bugs have an extremely stable and efficient model of locomotion: the tripod gait. At any time, roaches have 3 feet on the ground–even when they’re running. This tripod structure makes insects extra-resistant to tripping or tipping over. Biomimetics is the fancy name for engineering systems that copy principles found in nature.
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Just Give Up. It's Impossible to Bug-Proof Your Home

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By Gwen Pearson
| WIRED Magazine Verified
How many insects do you think are in your home? None? One? A hundred? Some new research suggests you need to step that number up by a factor of 10. Or more. But don’t panic: Insects and their relatives are living peacefully in your home. They aren’t bothering you. Well, except psychologically, now that you know hundreds of them are there. Entomologists have been saying for years it’s not possible to have a completely bug-proof home; now there are numbers to back that up.
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Insects, Bigamy, and History

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By Gwen Pearson
Today I will entertain you with some random facts about a favorite (and very infamous!) entomological figure: Harrison G. Dyar (1866-1929). Dyar is one of the truly bizarre figures in Entomology. First a Smithsonian scientist– then dismissed over charges of bigamy— he ended his career as an editor of a Bahai religious journal. Like many gentlemen scientists of the era, Dyar worked without pay, supporting himself with investments and his inheritance at the beginning of his career.
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