In honor of Valentine’s Day, we wanted to share our love and appreciation for YOU, our citizen scientists!

Over the last year:

  • 50 of you opened the nooks and crannies of your homes to entomologists in search of arthropods.
  • 989 (and counting) of you swiped sterile Q-tips across surfaces in your homes to sample microbes.
  • 65 of you let us scrape your face for mites.
  • 22 of you went without deodorant for a whole week during the hot summer and sampled the microbes of your armpit each day.
  • 42 of you have sent pictures or specimens of the camel crickets you observed in your homes. Hundreds more shared sightings of the ‘sprickets’ in your midst.
  • 850 of you set cookie baits and collected ants in the green and paved areas of your yard to help us map ant biodiversity in the places where we live.

And countless others have chimed in on our blog, Facebook page, and via Twitter about the ecology and evolution of the species with whom we share our daily lives.

Your dedication and enthusiasm to our projects never cease to amaze us. We value your participation and it’s an honor to get to interact and do science with so many of you on a daily basis.

What’s more, in addition to sharing your time and ideas with us, you’ve showered us with love notes, emails, prizes, and photos. Here’s a collage of a few of those items we’ve received from Wild Life of Our Homes participants in the last few months. They’ve brought smiles to our faces (many we’ve used to decorate the lab!), and thought you’d enjoy seeing them too. We’ll post a whole album of them up on Facebook.

Happy Valentine’s Day!