Well hello there! My name’s Damián and when I was a child, I had a tremendous entomophobia! I couldn’t stand being around the little critters that run our world. Back then, I didn’t even comprehend the differences between insects and other arthropods, nor their importance.

Lucky for me, during high school, I enrolled in volunteer work at a zoo in my hometown of Puebla, México. There I had to feed animals with crickets and cockroaches. Gradually I began losing my fear of them, understanding them and even loving them! For my bachelor’s, I studied plant-insect interactions in the cloud forests of my country.

It was during my master’s that, by chance, I had my “weevil-ification”. An entomology professor at my university shared information about the Annual Meeting of the Entomological Society of America. Due to the pandemic, it was fully online, which meant I could participate! It was my first international meeting, and I was so excited! During the meeting I met Dr. Lourdes Chamorro, who asked if I was interested in working with weevils and shared the contact of Dr. Milan Janda. Turns our Dr. Milan is a myrmecologist, but with a soft spot for weevils, so I ended up doing my master’s with him, and Dr. Juan José Morrone, about elevational diversity patterns of leaf litter weevils (Cryptorhynchinae), across El Cielo Biosphere Reserve in northern México.

Afterward, Dr. Milan invited me to do my PhD in his country: Czech Republic! Currently, I’m in the beautiful city of Olomouc, researching the ecological and evolutionary relationships of tropical insects of the southeastern Pacific archipelago, which, of course, includes weevils!

Feel free to check out my research at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Damian-Villasenor-Amador

And if you’re doing some ecotourism in México, why not visit our nature reserve? https://conservacion-anfibios.org/. A few colleagues and I created the reserve in 2022 and although the flagship species are vertebrates, I guarantee you there are plenty of weevils!