Here is one of those off-topic general science stories we were just talking about. It may be of interest to those of you who camp extensively or go fishing. At my place of employment, we recently received several large crates from a business partner in Canada. In one of them, my crew found the largest insect I have ever seen that wasn't dead and pinned under glass- it was easily 3 inches long and almost an inch wide. In fact it appeared to be perfectly healthy. Our shipping/receiveing supervisor called the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and emailed photos of the animal. Here is the reply of a staff zoologist, George V. Oliver: *"The insect in the 2 digital photographs that you sent is a giant water bug (Belostoma sp.). It's a true bug (order Hemiptera) in the family Belostomatidae. Giant water bugs do rarely occur naturally in Utah and Arizona, but whether this one is the same as our native species is uncertain; due to its size I would think it is an Asian species, which are very rare. * *Although I was not certain of the exact scale (despite the backgrounds that you provided), it looks large to me, and, if so, it's a female. The males are much smaller than the females, maybe a third or quarter the size of the females. The females of some species of Belostoma get to be more than 3 inches long, maybe even 4 inches.* *They're aggressive aquatic predators and kill small fish, (Up to four pounds) and tadpoles in addition to invertebrate prey. (They suck the juices out of their prey with their proboscis.) Under water, they're good swimmers, but they also leave the water and fly around in the air, often being attracted to lights at night. The big females can produce a painful bite to a person if one handles them carelessly. (They stab their sharp proboscis into a fish, tadpole, or a person's finger.)* *As I mentioned in our telephone conversation, you may wish to contact the Utah Department of Agriculture about what to do with the insect. You may also wish to contact the federal agency APHIS (which, I believe, stands for something like Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service), which has a office here in SLC and which has staff entomologists."* Our shipping/receiving supervisor then goes on in his email to fellow employees: *"And the USDA: Plant Protection and Insect Quarantine Dept. just picked up our little friend. Randal from that Org. who came to pick the bug up, said it was the largest he had ever seen!"* So, the speculation is that an Asian water bug made it to Utah, via Calgary. If I find out definitively what the species is and where it came from, I'll post that info. And BTW, I work next to an open canal in Davis county...if this bug had friends who escaped...