Contact
I can be reached at arthroverts @ gmail .com. I am always happy to talk about invertebrates, conservation, and the sciences.
About
Seeking the lost till all is made new.
My name is Jessiah, AKA Arthroverts, and I’m a writer and citizen scientist. As an independent journalist, I cover the world of invertebrate study and conservation, particularly in Southern California. My passion is for what Piotr Naskrecki described as “the smaller majority”: insects, arachnids, crustaceans, reptiles, and the other small creatures of the world.
I love finding niche stories that speak to bigger ideas in our world – like what a cockroach has to do with international corruption and the largest unmined iron ore deposit in the world – and I believe there are a tremendous amount of good things out there if we are willing to look for them. Arthroverts.org is a platform for seeking the good and the lost till all is made new.
Working in Southern California, one of only 36 biodiversity hotspots in the world, I am hugely privileged to encounter undescribed and lost species all the time. While the majority of what I write about deals with Californian biodiversity, I have covered stories from other regions, including my interview with Australian invertebrate breeder Declan Hegge and my advocacy for the critically endangered Dunedin Peripatus (velvet worm) in New Zealand.
Caring for nature in the Anthropocene, and especially in California, is often dispiriting, but I look forward to a day when humanity and nature are renewed together. That’s what keeps me hopeful, and I write stories about forgotten invertebrates and the people studying them to remind others that protecting nature’s “least of these,” i.e bugs, is not futile.
If you want to seek the lost till everything is made new with me, follow this website. You’ll get updated on all the latest stories. And if you want to get in touch, send me an email at arthroverts @ gmail. com. I’d love to chat :).
More about my story…
I’ve always been fascinated by bugs. One of my earliest memories was of flipping a rock with my dad and finding a velvet mite. Ironically, I struggled with severe arachnophobia throughout my childhood, and it wasn’t until I was 12 that I was delivered from it. After that I immediately started keeping tarantulas as pets. My fascination with invertebrates in captivity has allowed me to do a lot of cool things, including importing the first Epiperipatus barbadensis velvet worms for private breeding into the US, starting the largest database of millipede husbandry information available, and founding the Invertebrate Club of Southern California, the largest active regional group for invertebrate breeders, enthusiasts, and citizen scientists in the US.
I’ve always loved invertebrates for just how cool they were, and through keeping them as pets I’ve been able to meet a lot of awesome people who went beyond keeping them in plastic boxes to trying to understand the whys and hows of their existence. These researchers, conservationists, and citizen scientists have shown me that the way a tarantula makes it into my home terrarium may not reflect positively on the concern I claim to have for the wellbeing of these creatures. As keeping invertebrates has moved more and more into the mainstream, there have been some pretty devastating affects on wild populations as interest in these creatures for their own sake is replaced by the economics of the market.
Today, I use my experiences with the pet hobby to inform my approach to citizen science (which is why I obscure locations on all my iNaturalist observations), and vice versa. My journalism is a reflection of these varied and occasionally contradictory experiences, and so you’ll see discussions with cool scientists doing fascinating work in the field and with responsible enthusiasts breeding rare species in their spare room. My hope is that arthroverts.org encourages everyone to work together for the good of the animals we love, and in its own way, for our own good too. I might say “seeking the lost till all is made new” is my tagline, but it’s always been everyone’s responsibility.
My Other Projects
Invertebrate Club of Southern California
The Millipede Enthusiasts’ Database