Congratulations to Dilip Venugopal and Galen Divley on their publication released today in Royal Society Open Science!

Climate change, transgenic corn adoption and field-evolved resistance in corn earworm. ​
​Pests aggravate the agricultural costs of climate change. Understanding climate change interaction with transgenic crops, a key insect pest management strategy, helps minimize agricultural losses. We found that increasing temperature anomaly and its interaction with high Bt acreage probably accelerated Bt resistance development in a major crop pest, corn earworm. Bt resistant corn earworms may spread further given extensive Bt adoption, and their range expansion due to climate change. We highlight the need to incorporate evolutionary processes affected by climate change into Bt resistance management programs, and the challenges posed by climate change for Bt biotechnology based insect pest management.

Check out the full article here. 

Dilip Venugopal completed his Ph.D. in the Entomology Department in 2014, co-advised by Drs. William Lamp and Galen Dively. He is now a AAAS Science & Technology Fellow at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C. 

Congratulations to the recipients of the Fall 2017 Ernest N. Cory Undergraduate Scholarship! This scholarship provides up to $1,000 for undergraduate students each semester who have creatively contributed to Entomology Department research and/or extension efforts. Be sure to check back in the Fall to read more about their research progress! 

ABIGAIL TORETSKY, Palmer Lab, Undergraduate Research Assistant
Abigail's early work in the Palmer Lab consisted of sorting laboratory materials, discussing primary literature on wetland hydrology and biogeochemistry with graduate students, and assisting with the construction of field equipment. This work gave her a better understanding of how the lab uses raw field data to draw conclusions about wetland gas flux. This summer, Abigail plans to collect and analyze water samples after a storm from a wetland, nearby streams, and ground water in order to determine possible sources of ion flow into the wetland. Based on differences in the ion concentrations in these different areas, these data will hopefully help define the role of the wetland in the overall watershed.

JESSICA HERNANDEZ, Pick Lab, Undergraduate Research Assistant
While the Pick Lab traditionally uses Drosophila melanogaster to investigate the regulatory genes and pathways that control embryonic development – with an emphasis on pair rule genes – Jessica’s work in the lab focuses on orthologous pair rule genes in Oncopeltus fasciatus, an intermediate germband insect. Under the guidance of Pick Lab postdocs and graduate students, she has been able to isolate a new gene from O. fasciatus using a variety of molecular techniques, including PCR, TA cloning, and DNA sequencing. Ultimately, Jessica would like to attend professional school where she can complete an MD program in Emergency Medicine.

MERVIN CUADERA, Fritz Lab, Undergraduate Research Assistant
Knowing the important role that mosquitos play in disease transmission, Mervin thought working with Dr. Fritz would be both interesting and relevant to greater societal problems. Apart from rearing mosquitoes, Mervin is involved in a study of the effects of blood feeding source on fitness in Culex pipiens and C. molestus. Previous work suggests that C. pipiens prefers avian blood, while C. molestus prefers mammalian blood, leading to the prediction that preferred blood sources confer the highest fitness as measured by the number of eggs produced. Early results suggest that both strains, instead, have higher fitness when feeding on avian blood.

Early on, the Fritz Lab found it hard to count eggs accurately due to significant (and often nauseating) motion under the microscope. Therefore, Mervin suggested that they mount a camera on the scope to improve counting accuracy. The success of this approach has made it standard protocol for this research project. 

VICTOR SETTLES, Gruner Lab, Undergraduate Research Assistant
Victor has been impressed by the diversity of insects since he was a child. After taking an entomology course this past spring and reading deeper into the primary literature, he pursued an undergraduate research position in Dr. Dan Gruner’s Lab. He now works under the guidance of Elske Tielens, a Gruner Lab BEES graduate student. His major tasks involve sorting, identifying, and curating arthropod samples from the Hawaiian Islands in order to assist Elske in investigating the effects of invasive predators on canopy insect communities in forests fragmented by lava flows and how these communities assemble over evolutionary time.

​Victor hopes to use his experience in the Gruner lab working with dichotomous keys and learning to develop hypotheses about ecology and evolution to build a foundation in research that will ultimately set him on a path towards a career as a Principle Investigator.  

The mechanisms of exactly how mosquitoes locate their human hosts still elude the scientific community. Dr Conor McMeniman’s lab at Johns Hopkins has made advances in understanding the important role that the CO2 we exhale has to play in mosquitoes’ host-finding abilities. With the urgency of the Zika threat looming, understanding its mosquito vectors’ human-finding processes is vital to public health.

Ph.D. student, Samuel Ramsey of the vanEngelsdorp Lab took 1st place in the 4th annual 3MT competition on April 5, 2017. After much preparation and making it through the first round of competitions the week prior, he scored the top prize!

Sammy will be awarded $500 and will go on to represent UMD in the International competition in October. Here is some info on the background of the competition but without the winners for this year updated on the site.

Please offer him congratulations when you see him. We are very proud!

Tackling challenging and complex questions about ecosystems, Dr. Jamin Dreyer explores how we can better understand natural processes to improve human interactions with the environment. 

Dr. Leslie Pick has a new book out through Academic Press publishers titled Fly Models of Human Diseases. More information on her book can be found here. Check out the flyer below for more details!

We live in a world full of signals. We are constantly bombarded with exciting new combinations of light, sound, taste, smell, and texture. Ultimately our brains interpret these sensations to form what we call reality. However, as it turns out, human beings are only able to perceive a small slice of reality: there are many smells which, for better or worse, we can never smell, and we can only see a tiny slice of the colors light has to offer (we refer to this small portion of wavelengths as the “visible spectrum”).

As it turns out, flies do not base their behavior on the smell of the fruit: they base it on the smell of the yeast growing on the fruit. When yeasts are removed from fruit, the flies do not know where to go. Dr. Syed’s team took a sample of yeasts abundant in fruit and associated SWD flies and found that SWD choose certain yeasts over others, but why?

To answer this question, they sampled the odors that were produced by his yeasts using solid-phase microextraction (SPME) to see if they were different. They were in fact different – qualitatively and quantitatively - with each yeast isolate producing a very complex and wide range of odorant repertoire. Approaching the point of despair at interpreting all of his data, a statistician swooped in to save the day. The statistician was able to distinguish between the yeasts based solely on the odors they produce.

Read more about Dr. Syed’s Work
 
Scheidler, N. H., Liu, C., Hamby, K. A., Zalom, F. G., & Syed, Z. (2015). Volatile codes: Correlation of olfactory signals and reception in Drosophila-yeast chemical communication. Scientific reports, 5, 14059.

Hickner, P. V., Rivaldi, C. L., Johnson, C. M., Siddappaji, M., Raster, G. J., & Syed, Z. (2016). The making of a pest: Insights from the evolution of chemosensory receptor families in a pestiferous and invasive fly, Drosophila suzukii. BMC genomics, 17(1), 648.
 
About the author:
 
Brian Lovett is a PhD student in Dr. Raymond St. Leger’s Lab studying mycology and genetics in agricultural and vector biology systems. He is currently working on projects analyzing mycorrhizal interactions in agricultural systems, the transcriptomics of malaria vector mosquitoes, and the genomes of entomopathogenic fungi.
 
Brief Summary:
 
At the first Entomology colloquium of the Spring 2017 semester, Dr. Zain Sayed described his work on the agricultural pest spotted wing drosophila. His work unravels how female flies use odors from yeasts growing on fruit to find their mates.

Beginning in the Fall of 2016, the entire Department of Entomology pledged to become a green department . Partnering with the UMD Sustainability's Green Office Program we underwent an extensive audit, evaluation, and received a list of sustainable behaviors we are practicing well and where we have room for improvement.

We have 23 goals to meet, 11 of which we have achieved to become Bronze Certified. So, what actions have we taken so far? Check out our list of accomplishments below!

Ear damage? In this case, we are not talking about listening to music too loud or standing too close to the speakers at a rock concert. Instead, Dr. Galen Dively, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Entomology, has unlocked the mystery shrouding the increased dmanage to ears of corn. Read more about Dively's study here.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus was channeling his inner taxonomist when he declared, “everything is in flux.” Depending on who you ask, taxonomy as a field precariously teeters between being either the foundation of all other biological sciences or the most esoteric debate topic two scientists can choose. Scientists rely on taxonomists to draw the lines between the species that we study so we can all be on the same page while we study them (imagine trying to plan a trip to the zoo without names for the animals). As Dr. Jason Mottern explained during the last Entomology Department colloquium of 2016, these lines are often drawn in pencil.

Congratulations to the winners of the Spring 2017 Ernest N. Cory Undergraduate Scholarship!

 Conservation biological control – a fancy term for the support of beneficial insects in a cropping system to enhance natural pest control - has long been of interest in organic agriculture. Lauren Hunt of the Department of Entomology’s Hooks Lab has been investigating the potential for conservation biological control in organic field corn using partridge pea (Chamaecrista fasciculata) to attract and support insects that feed on and parasitize pests. Many predators and parasitoids, collectively called beneficial insects or natural enemies, need nectar resources offered by flowers to successfully develop and reproduce. Partridge pea offers these nectar resources to insects in the form of flowers and via special glands, termed “extrafloral nectaries” located at the base of the petioles. These nectaries are particularly attractive to wasps known to parasitize a variety of insect pests, including stink bugs, corn earworms, and corn borers – common pests of corn and key pests in Lauren’s study.