I'm Max. I am a french entomologist living in Vienna since 2018. I work in scientific communication as a content creator. I focus mostly on communicating about insects, biodiversity, and urban ecology.

I have always been fascinated with insects. Already as a child I was spending long hours in the garden, looking at any insect I could find. I was lucky to have a mother who had naturalist interests as well, and I could find an insect guide to look at before I could read. Soon, I had a very easy and ready answer to every person asking me what I wanted to be when I would grow up: an entomologist!

I studied ecology and evolutionary biology in the Universities of Poitiers, Rennes, and Tours, in Western France. My studies focused specifically on behavioural ecology and functional morphology. I then moved in Austria, to work on a PhD project at ISTA, in the Social Immunity research group of Sylvia Cremer.

Even though I ended up dropping out of my PhD program because I had found myself in an environment that didn't fit me anymore, this years of fundamental research gave me a lot of opportunity to do scientific communication as a professional researcher, and I decided to make it the focus of my work now.

In parallel of my interest for insects, I also fell from a young age in Science Fiction. When I was 11, I remember being completely blown away and absorbed into Niourk, a novel by french author Stephan Wul where a young child travels around the world and discovers the ruins of society after most of humanity has came back to a tribal lifestyle. After that, I never stopped. Soon I started imagining and writing my own stories. Today, I try to tell science-informed stories about hopeful futures, inspired by the Solarpunk movement. For leisure, I also like to write occult themed stories for tabletop role playing games.

People seem to wonder often about this, so here are (some of) my favourite insects: the ants Dolichoderus quadripunctatus and Solenopsis fugax, the whole Order Strepsiptera (hence my username), family Myrmeleontidae (antlions), the ground beetle Carabus granulatus. List open for future updates!