Following on with the theme from my last post, here’s an article I wrote for the latest issue of the wonderful Wildlife Australia magazine.

Scale insects get a hard time. We usually think of them as pests, based on our experience with them in gardens and farms. But if a scale insect is living on a tree in the middle of a forest far from any human community, is it a pest? Or part of a complex web of interactions? Every living thing contributes to ecosystem function somehow and there are lots of interesting interactions that we overlook by focusing on simplistic labels.

Click on the image below to read the article.

© Manu Saunders 2018