Thread: Insect Bite
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Old 28-07-2010, 09:32 AM
echinosum echinosum is offline
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First recorded activity by GardenBanter: Feb 2006
Location: Chalfont St Giles
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Quote:
Originally Posted by No Name View Post
In twilight and whilst the damned thing is jumping or flying away as I'm trying to get a good look at it, many things look more similar than you might expect.
Indeed, so, as you admit, in such conditions you could hardly say it looked either like a moth or like a grasshopper, so how can you expect us to know based upon such information?

Basically, if you want to say much more about it than some rice-grain-shaped insect that bit me, you'll have to catch one and have a good look at it.

Years ago I used to hang out with an entomologist, and even she couldn't hope to say very much about something on the basis of such a glance, unless it was reasonably large and had very distinctive features (eg, honey bee) which is why she had pockets full of little pots and other things for catching insects. Then she'd stuff a crushed laurel leaf in the pot to kill it (a crushed laurel leaf gives off small amounts of cyanide, enough to kill an insect in half an hour or so). Only then would she be able to get a good enough look at it to say what it was.