Reminders: Voting for a new state insect at 2/10 meeting! Send in your nominations by Sunday!

[Amine Kousba]

Hi everyone,

Some quick reminders: 

1. We are NOT meeting at Cambridge Common this month on 2/10, we are going to have our pre-talk dinner at Nirvana at 1680 Massachusetts Ave at 6pm before our 7:30 meeting about forensic entomology with Dr. Samantha Sawyer!

2. We are also going to be voting on a new state insect at this meeting! Submit your nominations by following the instructions below by the end of the day on Sunday, February 8th! At our last meeting, we discussed making a petition to the State of Massachusetts to add on a second state insect (in addition to the seven-spotted ladybeetle). Click this link to view my slides about this if you wish, but all the information is summarized below.

We are accepting nominees for new state insects! If you would like to nominate an insect, please submit your nomination to me via email at aminekousba @ gmail.com (no spaces, it just formatted weirdly otherwise) by February 8th so we can vote at our February 10th meeting. Your email should include a photo of the insect, a range map, and ideally a sentence or two on why you think it's a good candidate (even if it's just "it's a totally cute bug!"). I'll add all these to a PowerPoint for voting purposes. 

Here are the criteria for our insects:

• The insect should be charismatic enough for the average, non-bug-loving person to care about its conservation
• It should be native to Massachusetts
• Ideally, it should be distributed through some different parts of the state so all people here can be proud of and admire their state insect!

Sooooo excited to see all our beautiful candidates!!!!!! I'm a big fan of the ones that have been sent in so far, thank you everyone who sent them in :)