I used to work with bugs

I spread bits of my history all over my blog so I may be repeating myself from time to time. But in light of Earth Day coming up on April 22nd, I thought I’d share with you a bit of my history that even I have a hard time believing.

I used to work with bugs.

Here’s what makes that so remarkable: I DO NOT LIKE BUGS. In fact, I’m quite the arachnophobe (and yes, I know that spiders are not technically considered bugs).

I graduated with my bachelor’s degree in Biology and absolutely no plans for my future. Me. The type-A goal-oriented classic overachiever. I was going to graduate, figure out a job for the summer, and then plan what to do next. At the last minute, I was offered a low-paying job at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Yes, it was low-paying but I was pretty used to that. But it was in my field! And it was at a MUSEUM! That sounded fun.

So I took a job as a research assistant and worked for the curator of Invertebrate Zoology. I helped her on projects like “Judicious Complications of Ecosystems,” a fancy name for collecting lake water and counting the plankton in the samples. Yeah. I sat in front of a microscope all day.

Sometimes I assisted her with her project on the gypsy moth invasion, a moth that flies into town, eats most trees in sight, and completes with more native species. Did I lose you yet? Basically, we set traps for moths, collected them, and identified the different species. So you could say I’ve seen a lot of moths in my day.

You know what I liked about that job?

If you said, cleaning the big spiders out of the moth traps, you’d be wrong. And it wasn’t counting plankton. And it certainly wasn’t reorganizing the collections where I had to see some of the largest beetles and spiders in my life (thank God they were dead and mounted).

I actually really liked the chance to appreciate all of the different species of moths out there. I actually had no idea there were so many sizes, shapes, and colors. It’s amazing to me now how many people don’t know the difference between moths and butterflies. Or that consider butterflies to be beautiful but consider moths to be pests.

They are beautiful in their own right. Just look at this little guy I found resting outside my garage door on Saturday.

It’s amazing the beauty we see if we stop to look around and just appreciate it. I encourage you to spend some time outside this week and find something really cool. There’s a lot out there to marvel at (except for spiders).

And teach your children too! Make a pledge to get out and get involved on B Kind 2 Earth Day this Friday, April 22nd.

Tagged as: #kind2earth, butterflies, Earth Day, moth species