GGA Blog

Are Horse Flies Dangerous To Humans? Horseflies are insects that belong to the order known as Tabanidae, and the genus referred to as Tabanus.

You May Have Seen Garden Centipedes In Your House Before Centipedes are awful looking creatures. I cannot imagine anybody wanting to hold a centipede. Some people like to handle insects, like grasshoppers and dragonflies. Some people have pet spiders, but centipedes are universally hated. You have certainly encountered a centipede skittering across the floor in your home at some point. Centipedes often move at high speeds, so squashing them can be a challenge, and messy if you succeed. One of the most common types of centipede in America is the garden centipede. These centipedes obviously prefer to hang out in gardens

How Spiders And Insects Cause Vehicle Accidents Have you ever freaked out over the presence of a spider or insect while driving your car? If you have, then hopefully your fear did not result in a crash. It may not be hard to believe that spiders and insects can cause drivers to lose control of their vehicles as the result of a jump scare. However, there are many lesser known causes

Which Occupations Carry The Highest Risks Of Insect And Spider Related Death? Some occupations come with serious health-hazards, or an increased risk of on-the-job death. The obvious examples include miners, pilots and law enforcement officers, and you could think of more examples with no problem. However, which occupations put individuals at the highest risk of being killed by insects? Some of you are probably thinking that there does not exist any occupations that put workers at risk of being killed by insects. We have all heard the experts claim that spiders and insects very rarely kill human beings. This claim may be somewhat true, but spiders and insects do, indeed take the lives of people that are on the job. As it turns out, farmers, construction workers and landscape workers are all occupations that see the most insect and spider related deaths. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, arachnids, mites and various insects contributed

Spiders Hiding in Your Fruit A lot of the fruit we buy at our local grocery stores actually travel a long way to get to us. Sometimes a few stowaways get included in the shipments of fruit we get from places like South America and the United Kingdom. While these hitchhikers might scare the daylights out of us when one happens to come with our bananas or bunch of grapes, experts say that for the most part these little surprises are nothing to get too worried about. Of course, most humans do tend to flip out when they find a spider clinging to their banana

What Are Those Small Green Creatures In My Pantry? The thought of finding live organisms rooting around in your pantry is not a pleasant thought, but for many people, the presence of bug-like creatures dwelling within kitchens is a day-to-day reality. These creatures are unofficially referred to as grain beetles. These beetles look like reddish brown alfalfa seeds. In addition to crawling within cupboards and on top of countertops, these beetles can also fly around your kitchen, as well as other rooms within a home. Surprisingly, these beetles are quite common

The Ants That Make The Lives Of All Other Insects Miserable There is an ant in existence that can force all other ants to vacate an entire ecosystem. This menacing ant is known as the Asian needle ant. As you may be able to guess already, this needle ant is not native to the United States. Nobody knows exactly how the Asian needle ant arrived in the US, but experts were able to determine that these ants arrived on US soil from Japan. Entomologist first discovered needle ants within American forests during the 1930s, where they were observed to be traveling through forests located within the Eastern region of the US. These ants are unique in that they are capable of migrating from forests and into residential areas without being hindered by natural predators. These nonnative ants have since been found within a variety of different environments, including people's yards where they are often found to be hiding out within potted plants. This is problematic since needle ants cause many insects to vacate forest environments

The Spider That Looks Like a Disco Ball I certainly never expected to come across a spider that could double for a disco ball, but it seems Australia is home to a lot of insects that seem like they could only exist in fantasy novels. The mirror spider, also known as the sequined spider

The Forensic Entomologists That Investigate Insect Contaminated Food There have always been televised programs that portray the nature of police work, and this has been the case even when the popularity of television was in its infancy several decades ago. During recent years, however, television programs shifted to portraying the nature of forensic police work. There exists too many TV shows to name that follow this popular trend. The job of a forensic detective appears quite glamorous, but in reality, the field of forensics is not solely limited to crime solving. There exist many types of forensic science, one of which is known as forensic entomology. Within the field of forensic entomology there exists many subgroups. For example, stored-product forensic entomology is one of the lesser-known types of forensic entomology. Forensic entomologists working within this particular field focus on finding the source