Hey, everybody. This is Ellen Weatherford. I'm here with Just the Zoo of Us. This is your favorite animal review podcast. And this week, this is an awesome, really exciting friend here to talk about an awesome and really exciting animal. This is Charles Wallace. Say hi, hi, Charles.

Hey. I'm so excited to talk to you and virtually meet you.

First, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Absolutely.

I am a current PhD student in biology at Arizona State.

My background is in entomology and insect systematics.

I wrote my emasthesis on a family of flies called eulidiati,

otherwise known as the picture winged flies, because they have,

not all of them, but most of them have these distinct patterns of pigmentation on their wings,

and they use their wings in defense displays and mating displays, probably other kinds of displays

that we haven't explored yet. They're very pretty little flies. I really encourage everybody

to look them up.

And so now I am a PhD student in Arizona, and my focus, basically I am interested in the questions of how and why we do taxonomy, i.e., you know, the classification of organisms the way we do. And I am particularly

interested in those questions as they pertain to a group called Dictioptera, which includes

mantises, cockroaches, and termites. Cockroaches. Okay, this is what we're talking about today.

So we're bringing it in. I'm excited to learn about cockroaches because I admittedly

know very little about them. I'm a blank slate. I'm a clean canvas for you to paint a beautiful

picture of cockroaches on. Can you tell me a little bit about what got you into working with

cockroaches? Always. So my Dick Teoptera love story is, I think,

a pretty classic one. String music playing in the background. Yeah. So I was initially

interested in mantises because they're a pretty accessible entry point. They're large,

they're charismatic. They have very cat-like movements.

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