I'm going to have to kill a variety of bugs for my junior year bug project...:( not looking forward to it, at all. hoping to either 1.get other people to do it for me or 2.just find a lot of already dead ones. however, if i must do it myself, i will - is there anything i can tell myself that will make it easier to do?

what bugs do you step on and how do you step on them?

If you are thinking of killing a " bug ", I think it best to feed it to another bug, say like to a spider or a hoard of ants.

I know a woman who is so devotely Hindu if she is outside after dark, she does not speak for fear of swallowing an insect.

ah...but if it werent for natural vectors keeping our own numbers in check, well, who knows what this world would come to....

Never heard of a Jerusalem cricket.....How are they different from the "common cricket". Our Bearded Dragons eat crickets...perhaps best to avoid the Evil crickets then

Oh sadness....I just read about your hatred of the lovely Jerusalem Cricket. The are actually more likely to mulch your soil and take care of garden pest and the like.... They are cool insects.....

However - Having grown up in Michigan near a bog.... I was brutely massacred by mosquitoes and deer flies every summer. AGGGGGGG.

Pests...So we used to encourage bats...some neighbors even built bat boxes....

Honestly, the best way to rid yourselves of unwanted bugs is to find their natural enemy. this will help your moral conflicts and it is better for the environment. I firmly believe in eco-warfare in my garden and house. I have spiders living in the corners eating whatever flying things manage to escape the cats. I also catch crickets and things for my tarantula. We use natural parasites to rid ourselves of most insects from grasshoppers to grubs. We only use this is there is a problem due to all our neighbors using those nasty pesticides.

For those who kill black widows: Be warned! The False Black Widow looks just like a real Black Widow with only slight differences. They eat black widows. Just thought you would like to know.

For Palmetto Bugs (AKA American Cockroaches): Bay leaves. If you can plant a few small bay trees around you yard, then even better! There is a chemical reaction in the roach from the fumes emenating from bay leaves that hinders movement. Palmetto bugs will not cross into an area surrounded by bay, because they can't move well. I use bay leaves in all my drawers, under the sink and under the bathtub if I have problems. Since my cats eat anything that crawls in this house, I have those issues only when the neighbors spray synthetic chemicals.

Yes, insects can become extinct like any other life form.
Here's a link:
www.eeb.uconn.edu/grads/rdu...nctinsects

Take away food, habitat, etc. and they'll go they way of the dodo, no matter how much they reproduce.

Probably some kind of orbweaver, I guess. I think they set up shop for the night, use their web that night, and go sleep it off somewhere, only to return the following night to do it again. Pretty things, orbweavers.

I avoid killing predatory animals on principle. I realize it's sort of counterintuitive, but the way I see it, the place of the non-predatory animal is partly to serve as food for the predator, which assures the health of the predated species by killing and eating some of its members. So, to kill a non-predatory animal does not much harm its species. With the predator, on the other hand, it's place is mostly to survice until killed by a competitor, or until it becomes too old to hunt. To cut down a predator in its prime does a lot more to throw things out of whack than does killing one of its potential prey. Even so, if I can't eat an insect, I'll tend not to want to kill it. It's a shame to kill a thing for which one has no use in its deceased form. I will make exceptions. if there's food out in the open, I won't tolerate disease vectors, such as flies or cockroaches. Normally, removal is impracticable, and waiting for them to come into traps allows them to breed and do their business. Where I work, food is abundant, and predators (much to the favor of their own safety) are scarce. Without predators or food scarcity, it's almost cruel to allow the so-called pest species get out of control; enabling their unchecked growth only creates an unsustainable scenario that means many, many more of them will suffer and die when the illusion of sustainability reaches its end. Either we kill them, or we let them take over the restaurant and the business gets shut down, thus cutting off the food supply and exposing them to more predators. Killing them steadily is probably more humane, I think.