Squished Bugs

Abstract

Field guides have been a vital part of biology disciplines for centuries. This article focuses on recent pedagogical innovations in biological fieldwork, in fields such as entomology and ecology—specifically, the creation of informal field guide photographs that depict insects as ecologists-in-training are most likely to encounter them: dead and squished on cards, in nets, and on other types of insect traps. This article examines the training of ecology technicians to identify collected insects in the field and the laboratory. Technicians (whether students or volunteers) are trained to the squished reference images, with the goal of improving their insect identification skills and aid in ecological knowledge production. Using this empirical example, the article argues that squished bugs more importantly represent a pedagogical opportunity to instill an ethical reflexivity in field technicians operating well outside of academic environmental humanities circles. Drawing on multispecies studies’ (and its animal studies antecedents’) focus on environmental ethics, as well as the scant but growing attention to “unloved others” like invertebrates, squished bugs are used as a way of reckoning with the destruction and deformation of life for the sake of conservation knowledge and, as Donna Haraway has suggested, “staying with the trouble” of killing insects.