Salvador Vitanza
With the summer monsoons bringing much-needed rain to the Old Pueblo, calls and identification requests are pouring into the University of Arizona Department of Entomology. And that s not surprising, said
Gene Hall, who oversees the University of Arizona Insect Collection and provides insect and other arthropod identifications as part of the Cooperative Extension s Insect Diagnostics Clinic. This is one of the first summers in probably three years that we ve had a lot of good rain, and that means our bugs are out in big numbers.
Arizona is home to one of the most biologically diverse populations of insects in the country, according to Hall. In the university s 2 million-specimen collection, more than 20,000 species are from the Sonoran Desert.