About Bug FAQ

Bug FAQ is a plain-English reference for the bugs people find in and around their homes in the United States. Each page starts with the question most people have: is this dangerous?

Where the facts come from

We pull facts from university extension services, US government agencies (EPA, CDC, USDA), GBIF, iNaturalist, ITIS and Wikipedia, then write short new sentences from them. Each sentence is checked against the source text, and anything we cannot back up is left out. Every section links its source.

Photos

Photos come from iNaturalist and other open sources under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA licenses. The photographer and license are listed under each photo.

Range maps

State maps count records in GBIF, which combines museum collections and citizen science. A state with no records may still have the bug.

Found a mistake?

Tell us on the contact page and we will fix it.

How this page works

This is one of the site's policy pages.

Every fact on Bug FAQ comes from a named source (university extension sites, government agencies, GBIF, iNaturalist, Wikipedia). The source is linked next to each section. If we have no source for something, we leave it out.