What I Do At Work

I painted this earwig.  Her paint is drying.  The forceps are so she can't get away.

Look!  A Patriotic Earwig.  Red, White, and Blue.

These are my paintbrushes. 

The paints.  We've been using the top six colors, and we just added "plum" to the mix yesterday.

    I paint earwigs as part of a Capture-Mark-Recapture study at USU.  We capture them from a study farm in Kaysville and take them back to Logan.  I mark them, then put them into a little cup with a cotton ball dipped in water and one kernel of pollen to keep them alive until we release them.  Last Wednesday we released 1200 earwigs.  We put up little cardboard rolls to capture them.  Then, we go out to the farm and open the cardboard traps and see if any of my marked ones have been recaptured.  It's Science...