Squished Bugs and the Sticky Questions of Fieldwork

If you’ve ever driven down a length of road on a warm day, you’ve probably arrived with a windshield splattered with the mangled remains of countless insects. Maybe you know the joke—What’s the last thing to go through a fly’s mind before it hits the windshield? Its rear end. It’s pretty grim, but so are the tiny casualties.

While roads are often studied for their harmful effects on insects—through direct mortality or as barriers to movement—roadside verges tell a more nuanced story. A growing body of research suggests that these linear, marginal environments can support unexpectedly high invertebrate diversity and even function as dispersal corridors for flower-visiting insects.

Against the backdrop of shrinking natural spaces, these findings are especially significant. Insects may thrive in small landscape elements, but their diversity is being steadily eroded by the loss and fragmentation of larger habitats (amongst other things like widespread pesticide use, agricultural intensification, and atmospheric nitrification). Amid this decline, even the most overlooked human-modified environments are poised to serve as vital refuges for the invertebrate communities that hold ecological processes together.

Recognizing this potential, conservation biologists and transportation agencies are exploring how roadside biotopes can be managed to sustain insect populations and contribute to broader conservation efforts. These efforts, however well-intended, create sticky questions of their own.

Conservation at What Cost?

Since 2019, ecologists Stack-Whitney and Whitney have been monitoring beneficial insect populations along highways in upstate New York to examine the importance of roadsides for pollinator species—species whose ecological significance and economic value have made their disappearance impossible to ignore. Their multi-year “roadside pollinator project” involves systematic surveys of insects at more than thirty sites using sticky cards, small, adhesive-coated colored traps designed to attract insects. After capture, the cards are sealed in plastic bags, stored in coolers, and later frozen in the lab so the insects can be identified and catalogued.

These sticky traps, which you may be familiar with if you’re a houseplant enthusiast, are a staple in entomological field research because of their effectiveness in large-scale surveys. They allow researchers to generate biodiversity and abundance data at a scale impossible through hand-collecting. They therefore provide a passive way for researchers to effectively assess the health and importance of habitats like roadside verges. 

These traps, however, are as unforgiving as they sound. The insects aren’t just killed; they’re left mutilated and indistinct, like the gruesome smears on a car windshield. 

As effective as sticky traps are in catching insects, the roadside pollinator project team encountered a problem: Some specimens were so mangled and embedded in glue that they were nearly impossible to identify. To address this obstacle, the researchers developed a squished bug field guide. As it sounds, the guide is composed of reference images to help technicians identify insects as they actually encounter them: dead, deformed, and disfigured.

This is where things get especially interesting—and not only because a book composed of bad pictures is an odd novelty. The squished bug guide catalyzed collective reflection from the research team on the research process behind the project; it confronted its users with questions of responsibility and the often-overlooked harms embedded in fieldwork. Somewhat unexpectedly, Stack-Whitney and Whitney found that technicians involved in the project were nearly unanimous in their discomfort with trapping and killing insects.

Assessing insect abundance, diversity, and movement might be useful for conservation efforts—and yet the methods raise uncomfortable questions, including the age-old one: Do the ends justify the means? Sticky cards may be convenient, but they’re also lethal to the very insects conservationists aim to protect.

This difficult reality is at the heart of the Whitneys’ recent publication, which probes the ethical dilemmas and hidden violence embedded in these practices. The authors cite geographer Jenny Isaacs, who reminds us that “conservation may be ethically motivated by care and righteous anger for biodiversity loss, but that does not mean it is entirely virtuous and innocent.”

The sticky card dilemma exposes the anthropocentric and instrumental rationale that underpins dominant, Western conservation paradigms. The urgency of achieving effective outcomes in conservation often draws us into an unresolved disquiet about the proper unit of moral concern. Much of conservation philosophy emphasizes populations, species, and ecosystems—ecological wholes whose protection can justify sacrifices of individual lives. Yet this moral calculus is not easily settled.

Compassionate conservation offers one explicit alternative, calling researchers to minimize lethal methods by adopting the principle of “first, do no harm.” But even this ethic runs up against practical limits, especially when scientific knowledge itself seems to depend upon killing.

We need approaches capacious enough to hold both the desire to protect nature and concern for individual animal lives—but no single ethic can fully contain that task. At the level of method, in the concrete doing of research, the ideals of conservation collide with the messy realities of practice. But what appears as a dilemma of method versus outcome is not only that; it is, at its core, an epistemological problem. That is, it is a problem bound up with the logics and praxis of knowledge production. For this reason, the Whitneys identify the sticky trap method as a form of epistemological violence.

Pesty Problems

As technicians engaged with the guide, they began to question the ecological roles of different insect groups. They suggested that efforts to enroll roadside verges in conservation programs require deeper understanding of the complex, often invisible lives of insects and the ecosystem services they quietly sustain. These efforts also demand a more critical look at the categories we impose.  Roadside habitats may shelter pollinators, but they also harbor those we dismiss as pests. (Which inevitably brings to mind another joke: Why did the insect cross the road? To get away from the pesty-side.)

Not all insects are celebrated. The line between pest and pollinator is often as invisible as the insects themselves. To call one “beneficial” and another “undesirable” is to assign value. This value assignment reflects boundaries shaped not by biology but by cultural attitudes and the political logics through which we frame the living world. These distinctions rank and order life into hierarchies that render some beings disposable and others worth protecting. The classifactory apparatus that exalts the beauty of butterflies and the horror of bedbugs is insect biopolitics, a form of political power exercised over bodies, health, and populations.

Yet, our relations with insects rarely conform to such tidy divisions. Beekeeping, for instance, can foster reverence and mutuality, while black soldier fly composting exposes our uneasy dependence on creatures we rarely revere. These examples show that multispecies entanglements are fraught with ambiguities and shifting responsibilities. To live together with insects requires accepting difference rather than erasing it. It also requires imagination—not as a flight from reality, but as the creative labor of world-making.

The squished bug guide emphasizes our fragile coexistence. It asks us to acknowledge the selective nature of our compassion and to reconsider the “unloved others” that slip through the cracks of consideration, conservation, and culture. Can killing insects be meaningful if it incites care, or even curiosity, toward those routinely overlooked, disregarded, or disliked? As van Dooren and Bird Rose ask, “Is there a category of others whose deaths can be ethically disregarded?”

Knowing, Imagining, Caring

The field guide was intended as a useful tool for knowledge production. But inasmuch as it aided the work of knowing, it also sparked meta, epistemological reflection on what it means to know. (You might think of it as the difference between doing and thinking about doing.) What began as a pragmatic tool for species identification became a site of pedagogical possibility. As the authors write, “The focus is not on what squished bug images are but rather what they mean.”

This blurring of method and meaning resonates with the environmental humanities and multispecies studies, approaches that attend not only to data and conservation outcomes, but also to the realities of ethical entanglement. Squished bugs offer a way of reckoning with what it means to “stay with the trouble.”

Conservation sciences direct attention to collectives—species, habitats, assemblages. The humanities, however, have clarified this focus as a particular imagination. This is important because the hardest questions we face cannot be answered by data alone. It is imagination that makes alternative worlds possible.

To solve our most difficult conservation problems, we need ways of seeing that unsettle categories, that draw us into entanglements, that remind us of our position in multispecies worlds. From this position, care is not optional but constitutive of being. The intrinsic worth of insects emerges not as a property possessed in isolation, but through co-constitutive dependence because we are, in many ways, made by what insects do.

The squished bug guide is just such an act of imagination. The authors do not name it in this way, nor do they frame it as an ethics, but it is difficult not to read it as one. By calling attention to the tiny deaths that typically recede into invisibility, the guide makes harm explicit, thereby also making care possible.

Care, as Puig de la Bellacasa so insistently writes, is not a simple sentiment but a practice. It is ambivalent, troubling, sticky, always caught up in the mess of relations it tries to hold together. The squished bug guide performs this stickiness quite literally, in its representation of bugs trapped on sticky cards, but also figuratively, in the way it tethers researchers and students to the moral weight of their practices.

So too, on the road, the windshield holds its own testimony, reminding us that every act of care begins in contact.

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Featured image: A grasshopper takes a ride on a windshield passing through San Luis Obispo County, California. Photo by David Seibold, 2011.

Anissa Bejaoui has a graduate degree in environmental science. For a long time she was absorbed by broad systems and patterns before she became attuned to the singular lives of animals moving within them.  Her own ‘animal turn’ led her to pursue a graduate degree in Anthrozoology at Canisius University, where she now studies how humans and animals make and unmake one another. Her writing asks what it means to belong in a world that isn’t exclusively ours. Contact.