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They stood hand-in-hand; arm-in-arm in the darkening and quiet laboratory. They stared at the door as the few bugs that remainined left the lab in their vials, safely snuggled in their plastic egg carton.

“Are they really gone?” one Bug Night-er asked, “Will there be more?”

The White Coats kept their gazes steady. Their faces stretched nearly imperceptibly with small smiles.

“It is done,” said the male White Coat, “It is over.”

“For now…” breathed the female White Coat. Did anyone hear her?

They filed silently out of the building into the night. The sounds of insects greeted them.

We’ll see you next year—or maybe this summer for field season when we deploy and retrieve rocks baskets. We will keep you posted.

In case you suffer from Bug Night message withdrawal, the 2017 weekly messages are posted at http://www.merrimackriver.org/forum/ for posterity. We are working on uploading the 2016 messages with their attendant retro movie images.

The Upper Merrimack Monitoring Program Digital Image Library™ is now online at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B8WzoY1ev57OTm1jWloyVFk4ejQ?usp=ing If the URL does not work properly for you, you may have better results by copying it from this message and pasting it directly into your browser. Feel free to use these images to help you with your Bug Night identifications but please don’t share them—they are the copyrighted property of the Upper Merrimack Monitoring Program. Thank you.