I'm sitting in my mega-cube in Natural Sciences, waiting for Acrobat to finish indexing some downloaded journal articles. My cube is in a large shared area; at present, I'm sharing the area not only with some equally sporadically present humans, but with the 36 plastic containers on the cube next to mine, each of them full of horribly active Colorado potato beetles.

I haven't put in an image link because, while photos of CPBs are easy to find on the web, they usually appear on pages cluttered up other photographs and technical pest-management advice. In other words, if you want to see some, they're easy to find via your favorite image search. One of the nefarious characteristics of CPBs is that they're so godawful adorable. I mean, these things are just cute as a bug. Chrysomelid beetles in general are pretty much the lookers of the coleopteran world (IMO, they tie with scarabs). But you really, really don't want CPBs in your potato field. And they're tough petits batards. I'm told they're difficult to kill even with a gadget called a "propane flamer". That's the only thing that's keeping me from wishing I had a propane flamer right here.

And you really don't want them in the next cubicle either. Crawling, scrabbling, mating, chewing on leaves, going scriiiiitch ... skraaaaaatch.... against the plastic walls of their little boxes. You're trying to do a library search. Skraaaaaattchhhh. You're trying to concentrate on a journal article. Skraaaaak. You step out for coffee, a nice espresso shot in a dark roast fair trade, the pride of Grand River Avenue, and when you come back, as the caffeine jitters are kicking in .... skraaaaaaaaaaaaakkkkk.

Hey, youse bugs. Shut up!

Only in an entomology department. My bugs are better-behaved than your bugs. At least their formic acid spray is silent but deadly.