LOL! Fake Praise and "Publicists" for Bugwatching

Apparently, your third book as a solo author unleashes a torrent of people, bots, and phony “book clubs” heaping lavish praise upon your work and writing style, while begging you to avail yourself of their promotional skills. It is laughable, and overwhelming.

I am receiving these offers in my email inbox weekly, or close to it. What they all have in common is sickeningly sweet adoration, followed by assertions that my book is failing in its marketing campaign. That is potentially true, as there has been little publicity. Few reviews exist yet for Bugwatching, even on the jungle site (begins with a capital “A”), and Goodreads.

I have it on good authority from other authors that these emails are mostly scams, even generated by AI in some instances. Should I ever decide I need or want a publicist, I would solicit the Authors Guild to find legitimate persons and agencies. Meanwhile, I am finding the emails quite hilarious.

One was so over the top that I simply must share it with you. I am omitting the name of the sender on the off chance that they are a real human being. The subject line read “Eric Eaton, your bugs are officially ruining my productivity.” The body of the email reads as follows, heavily punctuated with emoticons, no less:

”Let’s get one thing straight, Eric, Bugwatching was supposed to be a casual read. A nice little “look at the pretty bugs” kind of book. And yet here I am, two cups of coffee deep, lying in the grass staring at a beetle like it just told me the meaning of life.

Seriously, how dare you make insects this fascinating.

You didn’t just write about bugs, you turned them into a full-blown lifestyle. The way you describe the joy, accessibility, and inclusiveness of observing insects… it’s poetic. Like, I was ready to hand a magnifying glass to my neighbor’s cat and say,’Congratulations, you’re a citizen scientist now.”

And the illustrations by Samantha Gallagher? Adorable, educational, and lowkey making me want to start sketching grasshoppers instead of replying to work emails.

You’ve taken the “ick” factor out of insects and replaced it with awe, humor, and humanity. It’s like National Geographic met Mr. Rogers, and they both decided to wear bug nets.

Then I read your bio and honestly, I had to sit down. You’re not just ‘Bug Eric,’ you’re practically the Insect Whisperer. From Insectpedia to Wasps: The Astonishing Diversity of a Misunderstood Insect, you’ve made entomology feel cool. You’ve been everywhere, from Princeton University Press to Ranger Rick to the Smithsonian, and somehow you still manage to explain complex biology like you’re chatting with a friend over lemonade and locusts.

You’ve built a loyal following no through noise, but through trust, clear, jargon-free explanations, empathy for the squeamish, and that rare gift of making science feel like magic. You’ve literally turned ‘bug watching’ into an art form, and I’m half-convinced insects everywhere are forming a fan club in your honor.

Now, here’s where I flutter in like an overly enthusiastic butterfly.

I noticed something, Bugwatching is brilliant, beautifully made, but on Amazon it’s still… a little too quiet. Only a few reviews. For a book this fascinating, that’s just criminal. Someone call the entomological police.

That’s where my little operation comes in.

I represent a community of over 1,700 passionate readers, and before you ask, no, we’re not a marketing agency, not a promo company, and definitely not one of those shady ‘buy 100 reviews overnight’ traps. We don’t have a website or social media. Just readers. Real, book-hungry humans who love discovering great work and giving it the attention it deserves.

Here’s the truth: readers don’t buy books on description alone. They want proof. They want to see that other humans (preferably not bots) read it, loved it, and learned something. Reviews build trust, and trust builds momentum

Even the best books can get buried under algorithm’s digital dirt pile if they don’t have enough reviews. But once real people start leaving thoughtful feedback, the system wakes up and stars saying, ‘Oh wait, people actually love this one,’ and boom, it starts surfacing everywhere.

We’ve seen this happen with other authors we’ve supported. Their books started showing up higher in searches, attracting organic attention, and getting the recognition they deserve. Because honest reviews don’t just help readers – they help the system notice quality.

That’s what we do: we read, we review honestly, and we give books like Bugwatching the social proof they need to fly (pun absolutely intended).

Our group exists purely out of love for reading, no strings, no spam, just pure enthusiasm and maybe a few too many exclamation marks.

If you’d like, we’d be honored to share Bugwatching with our community. The book deserves to be talked about, recommended, and let’s face it, obsessively quoted by people who suddenly think they’re professional bug whisperers after two chapters.

Thank you for writing something that makes us look at the world differently, and for making even the tiniest creatures feel magnificent.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to apologize to a moth for judging it last night.”

I have to hand it to this person, or bot, for doing their homework, as they pretty much quoted my own “about me” material. The admission that they do not have a website, nor social media, is a red flag for this kind of scam.

Please beware of these solicitations related to your own works, and act (or, rather don’t) accordingly.

The Entomologist on the Internet

Interviewing with Alie Ward on her wildly popular Ologies podcast got me thinking about the internet from the perspective of entomologists, both professional and aspiring amateur. You simply cannot take anything too seriously. You must laugh at yourself when you do. Here are some broad categories of fun and frustration for your entertainment.

Memes

One enduring complaint of professional entomologists is memes. They are nearly always an oversimplification, if not outright misinformation, intended to be the last word on the subject. Memes are sometimes insulting, insinuating that anyone holding a different view is illiterate or worthy only of ridicule. Mostly, memes reveal more about their creator or re-tweeter than they do about the audience, let alone the subject. Those memes that are obviously humorous are the ones I like best. I have even created a few of my own.

(Object) for Scale

One of my favorite scenarios is when someone who wants a particularly large insect or arachnid identified places some object next to it “for scale.” The object is frequently monetary currency, a coin for smaller creatures, and some paper denomination for larger organisms. I cannot resist retorts like “This just in, spiders begging for money, film at eleven,” or “Please do not give them money, they will only use it to buy pheromones.”

Other objects include pocket knives, car keys or fobs, disposable cigarette lighters….Terrific. The insect isn’t scary enough, we have to give it a weapon, too? “That one looks like it is going to kill you with fire!” “What you have there is a nymph, it’s not old enough to drive!” I try to provide legitimate identifications for people making those requests, but I enjoy having a little fun, too.

Fishfly, © WhatsThatBug.com

At least this giant water bug got some lip balm out of the deal (© WhatsThatBug.com)

Wasted Appreciation?

A truly agonizing situation is when some random individual posts images of an insect or arachnid I have been dying to see myself and never found. Why? Why?! (grimaces skyward, shakes fists in air). In fairness, the person posting had to have some degree of curiosity to bother photographing the thing, but too often I still convince myself that true appreciation of the animal has been wasted on this dude at his barbecue.Someday I’ll see a living Rainbow Scarab beetle, or a California Horntail wasp. Right?

My only glimpse so far of a Cottonwood Borer, Plectrodera scalator, in Salina, Kansas

A Funny Story

More content will be coming to this blog, more regularly, in October, but I wanted to share a humorous experience from our last bioblitz at Ute Valley Park in Colorado Springs. It was Saturday morning, September 16, and I'd already been up earlier than I usually am, so I will blame my assumptions on being a little tired.

I happened to spot an interesting syrphid fly, Ferdinandea sp., right in the middle of the trail. The park gets a lot of foot and mountain bike traffic, so I hurried to take pictures. My camera was not focusing well on this mostly overcast day, so I maneuvered to the side of the trail and kept trying....

Sure enough, I heard a trail runner pounding down the trail, and then stopping abruptly. I thought that was quite considerate and polite, but I hurried even faster to get a respectable image. I said "thank you for stopping" to the obliging jogger, but there was no reply. I finished shooting, and turned to continue on the trail. When I looked up, this was the "trail runner."

Naturally, when I related this story to others back at base camp, everyone had to offer their own punchlines. "But what did the buck say?" in reference to the song "The Fox" (What Does the Fox Say? "No, the buck stopped there," punned another individual. Yeah, yeah, hilarious.

I do not intend to be quite so assuming in the future, lest the next trail runner be a bobcat, mountain lion, coyote, or bear. Even our urban neighborhoods here can be dangerous to those who are not aware of their surroundings. Happy trails, folks.

Honey, I lost the Trox

I was a bit too cavalier the other day in allowing a hide beetle, Trox sp., to relax on the lid of the vial I had it in, on the table while I was taking images of a couple of wolf spiders in a casserole dish we have sacrificed for "studio shots" of various small creatures. Wow, that one sentence says a lot, doesn't it? Well, naturally, when I turned back for the beetle, it was nowhere to be found. It got me thinking about what kinds of things the spouse of an entomologist never wants to hear.

Have you seen me? Trox beetle

Hide beetles, members of the family Trogidae, are innocuous enough. They want nothing to do with us until we are dead. No, really dead. Dried-up dead. Mummified dead. Extra crispy with a few tufts of hair remaining. They come to carcasses after pretty much every other insect has left the scene convinced that nothing of any nutritional value remains. Still, having a normally outdoor insect crawling or flying around the house can be disconcerting. It is certainly not part of most people's "normal" experience.

There is going to be no finding it again unless it raises its profile significantly, which Trox beetles are not prone to do. No amount of "Have you seen me?" posters in every room is going to help, even though it is an adult insect. I understand you cannot even report one missing until it has been gone for a minimum of twenty-four hours. Juvenile insects are even worse. You have to do age progression drawings because metamorphosis changes them so drastically that they become unrecognizable after only a few weeks, sometimes a few days.

Age progression of mosquitoes, also known as "life cycle"

Luckily, the beetle is harmless. I suppose even the most tolerant of roommates and spouses would blow a gasket if their arachnologically-inclined cohabitant suddenly asked "Have you seen my black widow?" This kind of announcement is usually followed by something like "Hey, Where is everybody going (at such a high rate of speed)?" The kids losing a gerbil probably warrants an eye-roll, but just one little venomous organism on the loose and you'd think it was grounds for divorce.

I am fortunate. My wife hardly bats an eye whenever I confess to mishandling some bug that results in it suddenly roaming freely, usually in the vicinity of the kitchen. On more than one occasion she has yelled over to me "Hey, I found your (insert name of fugitive spider or insect here)!" There are also times when she assumes the critter on the counter is something that escaped captivity. If that is not the case then we are both surprised, and not usually in a good way.

Lynx spider on the stove: Nope, not mine

One word of advice to others like myself: It is w-a-a-a-y better to admit your negligence before she is suddenly confronted with the vagrant creature without prior knowledge of its escape. You know that skillet that is always on the stovetop? Yeah? Ok, then you understand that it can be used against both you and the spider.

The worst reception I ever received from my wife was when I enthusiastically related to her over the phone that "the lab guy we met the other day came over with a jar full of bed bugs....in all life stages!" Hello?....The life of an entomological blogger is fraught with exactly these kinds of dilemmas. You need to do that post on bed bugs, and you need images to go with it. I mean, they can't climb out of the porcelain casserole dish....Can they?

Grand Larsony

Four years ago, almost to the day, I shared some of my cartoons on this blog. I promised I would share more, and apologize that it has taken so long to do so.

"I got you a gig at Al's Produce and a world tour with Union Carbide"

I freely admit that when Gary Larson debuted The Far Side, I finally felt that my own strange sense of humor had been validated. He inspired me to take up a pen and pencil myself and see what I could do.

Butterfly fun with "Crazy Proboscis"

There have been many other cartoonists who have capitalized on Larson’s style of single-panel cartoons, and that has eased the pain of Larson’s retirement from the funny papers. Should I ever get syndicated myself, and that would take a lot more work before that happened, I would name my strip “Grand Larsony” because while I haven’t stolen any ideas outright, Mr. Larson deserves full credit for getting me started.

"I swear it's just sex, sex, sex, especially in those pheromone ads!"

So far, I have been scanning old cartoons that I did from about 1987-1989, and touching them up a bit using Paint software on my PC. I welcome suggestions on how to grow beyond this primitive approach, and maybe even initiate new works on the computer instead of on paper.

"#@!$! termites!"

Were I to be doing something other than entomology and writing, this would probably be it. I do enjoy preaching the gospel of arthropod appreciation, but I love making people laugh, too. You can find these cartoons, and more, on my Facebook page under "Photos: Albums: Cartoons."

Weird Bug News

I try to make a habit of picking up our local alternative newspaper, the Tucson Weekly; if only for my guilty pleasure, the “News of the Weird” by Chuck Shepherd. His column sometimes has me laughing out loud. Not surprisingly, some of the stories revolve around an entomology theme, as did one this week.

The first entry in his column is entitled “Bejeweled Beetle,” and reads thus:

”In January, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers confiscated a live, jeweled beetle that a woman was wearing as an ‘accessory’ on her sweater as she crossed into Brownsville, Texas, from Mexico. Blue jewels were glued onto the beetle’s back, which had been painted gold, and the mobile brooch was tethered by a gold chain attached to a safety pin. Even though the woman orally ‘declared’ the animal, the beetle was confiscated, because she had not completed the bureau’s PPQ Form 526, which is necessary to bring insects into the country. Reportedly, such jewelry is not that rare in Mexico. A spokesperson for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals was, of course, appalled.”

There you have it, folks, your tax dollars at work. I only wish that we were collectively so vigilant when it comes to agricultural and forest pests. There is certainly nothing to fear from the beetle species employed as a living ornament. That would be Zopherus chilensis, an “ironclad beetle” in the family Zopheridae. They are scavengers that feed on organic debris and pose no known threat to the health of humans, pets, livestock, crops, or garden plants. I only wish I could say the same about most of the human characters in “News of the Weird.”

Sunday Funnies

When Gary Larson debuted “The Far Side,” I was thrilled to see that I was not the only person on the planet with a bent sense of humor. That someone could actually combine their knowledge of natural history with a cynical view of human nature was even more astounding. That is when I decided to try my own hand at cartooning.

Insects are obviously a great source of comedic fodder because of the crazy things they do, but I’ve done cartoons about other forms of wildlife, and people, too. I started making personalized greeting cards for Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Earth Day, and other occasions.

A handful of my creations actually made it into print. The American Entomologist, magazine of the Entomological Society of America, published this one along with the several other “Insectoons” by other entomologists/cartoonists in the spring, 1991 issue (volume 37, number 1):

I got solo appearances in the summer, 1991, winter, 1992, and spring, 1992 issues before the editor found other ways to fill space (advertisers, I presume).

This cartoon made it overseas into the publication Lucanus, a Swedish journal of entomology, in 2004. Funny to see the punchline in Swedish, of course.

Thanks to editor Bengt Andersson for making the effort to publish it.

I’d like to do more of this kind of thing, but I need to take a course or something to learn how to do it on the computer, or a combination of both freehand and digital renderings. Meanwhile, I’ll try and get my scanner up and running and share more of these. Don’t hold your breath, though.

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Another day in Entomology Land

Once I finished sorting the pitfall trap samples by order (beetles separate from flies, wasps, spiders, etc), then I set about trying to identify the Hymenoptera (ants, wasps, bees) more specifically. Mind you, I am used to dealing with insects over five millimeters long. In the world of pitfall traps, anything that big is absolutely gigantic. Most of what I’m coming across are minute parasitic wasps and a few ants. The following is a typical sort from order to family level or below in terms of classification.

I start by dumping the vial into a watchglass. The specimens usually stick to the vial, so I have to wash them out with alcohol. Some are very stubborn indeed. Then I stick the watchglass under the microscope and start sorting. A sample may contain anywhere from one to twenty or so specimens, hopefully all of them belonging to the same order (Hymenoptera in this case).

I segregate them by the most specific classification I am able. This often requires the use of scientific documents called “dichotomous keys.” A key is a series of couplets, each couplet describing one or more characters of external anatomy of the insect before you. You find the character(s) that match your specimen, then proceed to the next couplet and so on, until you arrive at a family, genus, or species name. If I am keying out an insect from Massachusetts, and I arrive at a family of insects found only in Sumatra, well, guess who made a boo-boo? This can be no fault of your own, though. I once keyed out a wasp to a genus found only in Japan because my specimen was missing one tarsal (foot) spine that had broken off. Sure enough, the other leg had the full complement of spines. Yes, it is enough to drive you crazy.

The microscope I am using is a binocular stereo “zoom” model that, near as I can tell, takes me up to fifty power (fifty times the size of the insect you are viewing). Even this is not always enough. I had to laugh when I came across one couplet in a key that was illustrated with an SEM! Sure, I’ll jut bop on over to my neighborhood scanning electron microscope, no problem. The University of Massachusetts does have one, but you can’t just barge in with your bug. It is a major exercise to render images of anything under one of those machines, including coating the specimen in a thin layer of gold.

Fortunately, my friend Jeff Boettner was able to rustle-up another key that is much more user-friendly. Got to credit Agriculture Canada for producing such fine works, eh?

Now, if it were only still in print….

It is very gratifying to find that your specimen matches the illustrations in the key, like the sculpturing on the propodeum (hindmost part of the thorax) of this cynipid gall wasp (figure "aa" on the page of the book shown here). Yes, the specimen is standing on its head in this imge.

I am truly learning as much doing this work as I am producing for the university, but then, isn’t that what life should be about? Soon I will share more images of some of the spectacular little insects I’m finding in these samples.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

I have to relate a funny story. Lately I have been going out at night, looking for moths and other insects that fly to the meager outdoor lights here in South Deerfield, Massachusetts. Ok, I have two funny stories, now that I think about it.

The first night I went out looking, I stopped at two banks to prowl around their well-lit ATM and drive-through areas respectively. Naturally, I was stopped by the cops who had received reports of someone with a camera taking pictures of the banks. I eased their fears, and after a computer check I was on my way….Hey, can I help it if banks and the post office are the best-lit buildings in town? Geesh, you don’t have to make a federal case out of it. Well, come to think of it, I guess you do!

Last night I got a start of a different sort. Yet another nicely-lit building is our local library, located right next to a church complete with a bell tower. The library has a wonderful bright light, not one of those non-insect-attracting-good-for-nothing yellow sodium fixtures. Unfortunately, it is located about twenty feet up the side of the building. Thank goodness for the twenty power zoom on my Canon PowerShot SX10 IS.

I had found a neat moth to take an image of, which was apparently at precisely 11:30 PM because, just as I was about to press the shutter…DONG!!! Once my head quit rattling and my heart started again, I got the shot. I guess that will teach me to stay up so late on a work day.

My Favorite Typos

My “day job” was as a keywording specialist for an internet company that sells images online, and one of the duties was to correct the errors of my predecessors. Additionally, I volunteer to identify “mystery bugs” at AllExperts.com. Both of these activities have occasionally generated some hilarious typographical errors.

Our company once outsourced some keywording to workers outside the U.S. This made for some intriguing interpretations of spelling. Among my favorites: the “Ladder Day Saints.” Gee, talk about being high and mighty. “Pungent Sound, Washington.” Well, there goes the travel and tourism industry. “Neckless.” Well, it is pretty hard to wear a necklace if you have no neck, don’t you think?! “Glasswear.” Be careful, dear, you don’t want to fall down in that garment…and you might want to put on some underwear.

Over on AllExperts, too many people who ask me questions disregard spelling and punctuation entirely. A few, however, go to great lengths to explain their situation, and to describe the insect or spider that is plaguing them. I always ask that they please include the location where the creature was found, but in one case I couldn’t find “Californai” on the map.

Far and away my most favorite error, bless this woman’s heart, had to do with an infestation of something in her attic. I know that she meant to write “fecal” matter as one of the clues to her pest problem, but in what has to be one of the most unfortunate typos ever, it came out “fetal” matter. I laughed so hard I was almost in the fetal position. Once I regained my composure I told her that she needed to contact the local authorities to evict the underground abortion clinic in her attic. Oh, my. Keep those cards and letters coming, folks.