There’s never enough time to explore all of the cool websites and resources I find for project meetings, so I’m going to put them here on the website for easy retrieval.
November 2025 meeting
Taxonomy of insects, worms, spiders, and more
Taxomony of animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria is fascinating! It is also incredibly complex and so many sites are just way too much information. Here are a few that will allow you to look at the different phyla, classes, orders, and families:
https://www.onezoom.org/ This is an interactive that doesn’t focus on a list of phyla, etc., but is rather an actual tree that you can zoom in and out to see where you are. Better yet, it has pictures and species names instead of more confusing taxonomy. Spend a little time getting used to it, even younger kids should be able to learn about species and how they are related.
https://www.catalogueoflife.org/index This is a more traditional listing of taxonomic names, but you can browse all of the different classes inside Animalia, and then the different orders of Arthopoda, and so on.
https://www.inaturalist.org/lists/96929-Davis–California-Insects-and-Bugss-Check-List?page=2&view=taxonomic This is a listing of all of the insects found in the Davis area by people contributing to iNaturalist with taxonomic names. This isn’t a complete listing but the nice thing is that it has photos and names of species, so you can see which insects are actually in a particular class or order.
General information about insects
https://bohart.ucdavis.edu/insect-info-sheets
Starting up our insect colonies
This is the site I’ll order from, take a look if you’d like to see the possibilities: https://www.rainbowmealworms.net/