You know you’re a biologist when:
(in increasing order of severity–some of these pertain to myself and others to my labmate, whose desk recently became the next-door neighbor to a sparrow’s nest, and who has just left to take a shower)
-you are happy to have a bird’s nest outside your window
-you think the half-plucked-looking naked baby birds inside are adorable
Baby sparrows outside my labmate’s window
-you are not unduly distressed when the bird’s nest becomes fairly obviously infested with some sort of tiny bug
-you are only mildly distressed when it becomes clear that the bugs have made it inside the window. You carry on writing your dissertation.
Ookaay. Once the bugs make it inside the window things are less cool. 12 point “G” included for scale.
-you relent and decide to head home only when the bugs start actually crawling on your person. You notify the lab manager, who calls pest control (see–we’re totally normal and responsible), and your lab mate down the hall (me) who…
-does not avoid your bench like a normal person.
-captures some of the bugs to look at under a microscope
-shares the view with her labmate, who would rather look at them than go home and wash up right away, and her baymate, a former arthropod specialist who declares they’re “kinda pretty.”
-then browses the internet with her baymate and labmate to identify that they’re some kind of bird mites (duh). Labmate, still totally calm but succumbing to common sense, goes home to shower and continue writing, while I…
-use the break offered by an hour-long incubation period to take better-quality microscope photographs and browse the internet for another half an hour or so to try to find out their species name.
I think they must be some kind of Ornithonyssus, possibly Ornithonyssus bursa, but if there are any arachnologists who know more I’d really love a stronger ID.
Bird mite, Ornithonyssus bursa (possibly). 20x, inside a 12-point font G.
As I write this, I’m wondering to myself if “arachnologist” is a real thing. Certainly bird mites are arachnids (subclass Acari, order Mesostigmata), so entomologist seems inappropriate.
Lest you think we’re unusually bonkers, I think Haeckel made a decent case that arachnids were kinda pretty, in one of my favorite books, “Forms of Art in Nature.” You can get id’s to the various creatures here on Wikipedia.
“Arachnida” from Forms of Art in Nature, Ernst Haeckel, 1904
A bouquet from Mendel 