Our local superhero origin story

This afternoon, Dr. Mark Lindsay posted a couple of photos of what was left of the bug that climbed up his daughter's leg, then seemed to have bitten her before succumbing to death by smashing, and he wondered what exactly was - especially after she developed small wheals on her leg and hand and he started thinking it looked like one of the "kissing bugs" that spreads the potentially fatal Chagas disease.

Fortunately, common sense and Entomology Twitter came to the rescue: Kissing bugs only tend to live in the tropics. And Dr. Alex Wild, an entomologist at the University of Texas and Jenn Forman Orth, a biologist and invasive-species expert at our own Department of Agricultural Resources, identified the remains as those of a western conifer seed bug, which is an herbivore, not a carnivore, and which does live around here.

Orth added:

And I suppose it would be more accurate to say they stab vs. bite, but they rarely do either, unless you are a pine cone...

To which Lindsay replied:

This will the superhero origin story of: Pine Cone Girl.