Luke Taylor: Celebrating 25 years of scoping out bugs

Dec. 14—Welcome to "Illini Insider," your regular dose of University of Illinois news from beat writer Luke Taylor. Fresh out of college himself, he's always looking for story tips, photo ideas and social media mentions. Email him at ltaylor@news-gazette.com and he'll give chase.

Bugscope's microscope is hidden back in the basement of the Beckman Institute where most people will never see it, but students from all over the country have looked through it.

After 25 years, the Bugscope program has gone through some changes, but it's basically the same: kids or teachers can mail in a bug sample they find and the folks at Bugscope will prep it and jump on a video call to share a close-up view with their scanning electron microscope.

T. Josek and Cate Wallace are the ones who talk with the kids and explain what they're looking at.

Josek is an entomologist who has always liked bugs but stumbled into studying them when other college majors weren't working out. They volunteered for Bugscope during grad school.

"It was fun seeing how all the kids would react to what they sent in," Josek said.

Wallace, on the other hand, doesn't have a background in entomology at all, but went from Bugscope student publicist to director of the Microscopy Suite over the years.

She said one of the coolest parts about the program was finding all the strange microscopic things that can be on bugs.

"You can find mites, pollen, grains, mold spores, fungus, bacteria, I mean like all this kind of fun stuff," Wallace said.

Josek remembers one of the strangest things they've found being a parasite on an insect sample sent in ahead of the Insect Fear Film Festival, which Bugscope helps out with each year.

Once Bugscope is ready to examine a sample, one of the team affixes it to a little plate.

The samples are often really tiny, so they can do a few at once, and it doesn't have to be bugs: Josek said comparing an insect wing with a leaf can be really cool.

The samples then go into a machine that coats them in a fine layer of gold palladium alloy, a conductor that allows the SEM to "see" the sample in incredible detail.

Some of the coolest bugs they've seen through the microscope seem pretty normal, though both Wallace and Josek say their favorites change over time.

"Mosquitos are so cool, they've got a lot you can see," Josek said, though they hadn't thought this until they got a really cool view of one recently. "It's like a new appreciation for something I had already seen."

That includes scales, halteres, unique mouth parts and cool eyes.

"I'm going to go with monarchs because their wings can be fun to look at. A lot of different butterfly wings can be fun to look at, their scales just have all these different tiny nanostructures," Wallace said.

Right now, Bugscope has about four sessions a month, but they're always looking to do more.

They've worked with classrooms in 48 different states, whether the teachers made a lesson plan and wanted to look at certain bugs or whether students were tasked with finding samples to send in.

The program is free, though, so private schools, homeschool families and individual kids are all welcome to reach out.

Bugscope has even worked with university students from other institutions who don't have access to scanning electron microscopes for whatever reason.