AN ENTOMOLOGICAL CLASSIC – THE POOTER OR INSECT ASPIRATOR S. R. LEATHER Department of Crop and Environment Sciences, Harper Adams University, Edgmond, Newport, Shropshire TF10 8NB I am sure that we can all remember our first encounter with that wonderful entomological device, ‘The Pooter’ and were probably all told to remember to ‘‘suck don’t blow’’ and also to remember to suck from the right tube. Despite this sage advice I am also sure that most, if not all of us, have somehow managed at some time to end up with a mouthful of small insects. So exactly what is a Pooter and when was it invented? I of course knew the answer to the first bit but had forgotten the answer to second (if I ever knew it). A quick Google search led me to this simple definition from http://brainsofsteel.co.uk/ post.php?id=Looking-for-Life-in-Your-own-Back-Yard ‘‘The pooter (sic – pedantically as it is named after a person so should be capitalised) is said to get its wonderful name from William Poos an American entomologist active in the 1930s, it consists of a small transparent airtight vial with two tubes protruding. One tube is put in your mouth and the other acts as a vacuum that will suck up bugs safely without damaging them. There is an inherent risk of sucking a bug into your mouth but that is half the fun.’’ Perhaps more authoritatively, The Oxford Dictionary online ‘‘A bottle for collecting small insects and other invertebrates, having one tube through which they are sucked into the bottle and another, protected by muslin or gauze which is sucked’’. They further add that the word originated in the 1930s and is said to be derived from the name of William Poos (1891–1987) an American entomologist. http:// www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/pooter The Dictionary of Entomology (Gordh & Headrick, 2011) defines it as ‘‘POOTER. Noun. A vernacular term coined by an English entomologist for an aspirating device used to collect small, highly mobile insects. Named in honor of F.W. Poos, an American entomologist who employed the device to collect Cicadellidae.’’ 52 BR. J. ENT. NAT. HIST., 28: 2015 Fig. 1 The Pooter as I came across it first as a student – inherently simple but incredibly breakable http://svalbardinsects.net/index.php?id=33