Division of Insects University of Michigan Museum of Zoology

Skip to main content

University of Michigan Museum of Zoology
1109 Geddes Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1079
Phone: (734) 764-0476

The Insect Division houses a world-class collection with over 4.5 million specimens from all over the globe. An emphasis on specific taxonomic groups has produced outstanding collections of the Acari, Orthoptera, and Odonata, and to a lesser extent, the Homoptera, Coleoptera and Lepidoptera. The aquatic groups and a significant portion of the mite collection are databased and there is an ongoing effort to make the rest of the collection digitally accessible.

Insect Division News

L. Lacey Knowles

Knowles president-elect of the Society of Systematic Biologists
The objective of the SSB is the advancement of the science of systematic biology in all its aspects of theory, principles, methodology, and practice, for both living and fossil organisms, with emphasis on areas of common interest to all systematic biologists regardless of individual specialization. Her term began January 1, 2012. (more)

John Cooley interviewed on NPR's Science Friday.
John, a former Ph.D. Student in the insect division and now a research scientist with the University of Connecticut at Storrs, will be interviewed Friday (May, 20th) about his work with 13 year cicadas. He runs the Magicicada website and has been tracking the cicadas emergence. For more information visit the Science Friday website.

Recent Publications

Mating mites trapped in amber reveal sex role reversal
In a paper published March 1, 2011 in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, researchers Pavel Klimov and Ekaterina Sidorchuk describe an extinct mite species in which the traditional sex roles were reversed. (More Information)

Estimating Species Trees, Cover

Now in print
A new book "Estimating Species Trees," edited by Professor L. Lacey Knowles and Laura S. Kubatko, OSU, examines recent computational and modeling advances that have produced methods for estimating species trees directly. (more)