definitely I guess I'm wondering if you're spending all of this time with scale insects, do they frustrate you? Are you excited by them?

Yeah, that's such a good question because, yeah, most of the time, you know, when I tell people I work on scale insects, they're kind of like, ew, why? I hate those things.

You know, you actually like mealybugs? Scale insects, I think, get really underappreciated because they're always seen in that context of being pests.

I think that they're really neat insects just biologically for a lot of reasons.

One thing that I that I failed to mention in my introduction of scale insects is that they actually have extreme sexual dimorphism.

So what I described was basically the female stage that are these big kind of squishy blobs.

They don't really have segments.

Can you talk a little bit about the process of determining that the scale is actually a new species?