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. 

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!

Post-doc Christopher Taylor (Hamby Lab), graduate student Veronica Johnson (Hooks Lab), and Professor Emeritus Dr. Galen Dively have a new publication titled, "Assessing the use of antimicrobials to sterilize brown marmorated stink bug egg masses and prevent symbiont acquisition" in Journal of Pest Science. You can read the abstract below and find the full feature here. Congratulations on your achievement!

Building engineered structures, such as dams and dikes, has been the conventional approach to water management.  Some suggest that such "gray" infrastructure make way for "green" ecosystem-based approaches.  Margaret Palmer, Director of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) co-authored in support of managing water in a green way.

 A new study by entomologists at the University of Maryland shows that brown marmorated stink bugs have a strong preference for ripe fruit.  The study, published online June 25, 2015 in the Journal of Pest Science, reports the number of stink bugs feeding on nearly 4,000 fruit-bearing ornamental trees representing more than 200 popular varieties grown for sale at commercial nurseries.  The researchers found that trees with ripe fruit attracted more than twice as many adult stink bugs compared with trees bearing immature fruit. 

Recent ENTM publications

•  Heffernan, J.B., P.A. Soranno, M.J. Angilletta, L.B. Buckley, D.S. 
  Gruner, T.H. Keitt, J.R. Kellner, J.S. Kominoski, A.V. Rocha, J. Xiao, T.K. Harms, S.J. Goring, L.E. Koenig, W.H. McDowell, H. Powell, A.D. Richardson, C.A. Stow, R. Vargas, and K.C. Weathers. 2014. Macrosystemsecology: understanding ecological patterns and processes at continental scales. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 12:5-14
• Li, C.R., Guo, D. and Pick, L.Independent signaling by Drosophila insulin receptor for axon guidance and growth. Front Physiol. 2014 Jan 20;4:385. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2013.00385.