Nouvelles
This is a guest post by Dr. Laurel Haavik, post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Entomology at The Ohio State University.
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I am a post-doc. I’ve been one for nearly six years. Like many other post-docs, I have been working for over a decade towards my goal: a tenure-track position at a research-intensive academic institution. I enjoy research and teaching, and so a career including both seemed like a logical pursuit. I must be good enough to succeed in this pursuit, otherwise someone would have told me to opt for a different path by now. After all, only a small percentage of Ph.D.s actually become professors. I must be pretty close to achieving this goal, because lately I’ve had several interviews – no offers yet. By now, most of my peers have secured permanent positions, although some have gone on different paths. It must be my turn soon. I had faith in the system; confidence in myself.
Earlier this summer, I was invited to give a talk at a conference, in a session on women in science. I accepted willingly; the subject seemed challenging and relevant. As I began to prepare, I realized I knew nothing about it. So, I did what any scientist would do: I turned to the primary literature on women in science. What I found changed my whole perspective on academia, my career, and most importantly: my life.
I learned that the tenure system is outdated, and filters out many creative and talented people. It was established ca. 1940, when those entering academic careers were mostly men. Assistant professors were expected to live on campus, and work intensively, around-the-clock, on establishing themselves until achieving tenure. Sounds a lot like graduate school, or a post-doc, doesn’t it? There’s not much room in that scenario for having a life outside of this pursuit. It turns out that not much has changed about this in the intervening 70+ years. To make it worse, there are now few jobs and too many of us with graduate degrees competing to fill them. It turns out that women, more often than men, are willing to forgo their academic dreams because of this ridiculousness, in favor of something better – probably a happier life. It seems that there are two issues. One: is it even possible? Women are confronted with the complications of basic biology at the very same time as they would be embarking on a demanding academic career. Most of us are well into our thirties, near the end of our child-bearing years, by the time we’re on the job search. Two: they’re exhausted, wondering if an academic career is akin to never-ending graduate school. In the academic atmosphere, there is intense pressure to do more; for example, publish or perish, fund or famish. Talent and creativity that science badly needs is undoubtedly lost as women and men continue to opt out of this outdated system, and for very reasonable grounds.
I took a long, hard look at my career so far. I’m on my third post-doc. I’ve had two failed relationships and a third that might not make it if I have to move again. I’m not married. I don’t have children. I’m in my mid-thirties, meaning that if I want to have children, I better get situated and do it soon. Maybe academia isn’t for me after all, even though my interests, teaching and research, are so well-aligned with the academic mission. I realized that my adult life so far, 90% career and 10% life outside of work, is a direct product of what I like to call our broken academic system. We need to better understand and voice our discontent with the broken academic system, or it won’t change.
I wondered if others feel the same way. In my field, had others thought of leaving science? And if so, why? Has the disparity in numbers of women and men graduates vs. those occupying professional positions actually changed in recent decades? Most importantly, what allows people to cope with such a rigorous career? I’ve been lucky to have had some great mentors, support from my family, and support and encouragement from the scientific community in my field. Have others had the same kinds of emotional support systems?
My study pursues these questions among three related fields: Forestry, Entomology, and Forest Entomology. In all three of these fields women are not historically well-represented, but this has changed in recent years, especially in Entomology. There are still few women in Forestry. Forest Entomology is a small field with a very inter-connected community, which I hope will provide an interesting contrast to its two larger, sister fields.
Please follow the link below to participate in my study, by completing my survey.
I invite men and women at all stages in their careers, as well as those who are no longer in science, to participate. Please forward this invitation to anyone you know who is no longer in science, but completed graduate school (M.S. or Ph.D.). The results of this study will be published in the primary literature.
Please follow the link below to complete the brief, 28-question survey by September 30, 2015
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/forestry-entomology
It may take 10-15 minutes to complete. I apologize for any cross-posting of this survey. No personal identifying information will be collected as part of the survey, and your participation will be completely anonymous. Answering questions in the survey will indicate consent. Participation is voluntary and you may withdraw at any time without penalty, and there are no incentives to participate. Participation will have no effect upon your relationship with the Entomological Society of Canada. This study has been determined Exempt from IRB review.
Please contact me if I can provide any additional information regarding the aims of or your participation in the survey (Laurel Haavik, 479-422-4997, haavik.1@osu.edu). For questions about your rights as a participant in this study or to discuss other study-related concerns or complaints with someone who is not part of the research team, you may contact Ms. Sandra Meadows in the Office of Responsible Research Practices at 1-800-678-6251 or hsconcerns@osu.edu.
Next September, the largest-ever scientific meeting of entomologists will take place at the International Congress of Entomology (ICE) in Orlando, Florida. For graduate students and early-career entomologists, it will be a fantastic opportunity to meet your peers from all over the world, present your research in a high-profile setting, and scout out potential study or career opportunities.
While you might be thinking that it’s an awful long time from now, and that there’s that pesky thesis that you have to get written, there are two important deadlines coming up soon that you should be aware of:
1. Travel Awards for Students and Early-Career Professionals
The international branch of the Entomological Society of America is giving a total of $50,000 worth of awards to students from outside the USA to attend ICE 2016.
Find detailed information about these awards here. Note that you need to be a member of the ESA to apply, that and membership will cost you between $50 and $150. If you plan to apply, you need to act fast – the deadline for application is September 1st, 2015.
Also note that the Entomological Society of Canada will also have a student and early-career professional travel awards program to assist with attendance at ICE. Information about these awards will be available soon!
2. The International Graduate Student Showcase (IGSS)
The Graduate Student Showcase, which has become a staple of ESC annual meetings, is coming to ICE 2016! Don’t miss this opportunity to present your finished research project alongside the top graduate students in entomology from around the world.
To apply, you need to be defending your MSc or PhD thesis between September 30, 2015 and September 30, 2016.
Find more information about the IGSS here.
The deadline for IGSS applications is October 31, 2015.
By Paul Abram
PhD Student, Université de Montréal
When Pink Floyd recorded their epic, psychedelic instrumental “Any Colour You Like” for the classic album Dark Side of the Moon, were they inspired by a predatory stink bug?
Three spined soldier bugs happily eating a mealworm. Their voracious appetite makes them a widely-used biological control agent of many different insect pests (Photo credit: Andrea Brauner).
Well … probably not.
The spined soldier bug (Podisus maculiventris), can’t actually lay any colour of egg it likes – but the real range of possibilities is pretty impressive.
The range of possible egg colours that can be laid by the spined soldier bug (Photo credit: Paul Abram/Eric Guerra)
Almost three years ago, when I started working with stink bugs and their parasitoid wasps, I noticed this astounding variation in the colour of the eggs of the spined soldier bug. I was surprised to find that nobody had looked into the cause of this variation or its potential functions. In fact, the function of insect egg colouration seems to have been a bit neglected in general. While I was initially hesitant to start on the dangerous path towards a PhD “side-project” (code for “I would like to take much longer to finish my degree, please”), I eventually caved.
In 2013, I was visiting a colleague’s lab where newspapers are used as a laying substrate for these bugs, and I noticed that there seemed to be a loose correspondence between the colour of the egg masses and the darkness of the paper, especially in high-contrast places like crossword puzzles. I wondered – could stink bugs actually adjust the coloration of their eggs to match the darkness of the laying surface? If so, this would be the first case of an animal able to selectively control the colouration of its eggs.
Back in Montreal a few months later, I started working on this question with an undergraduate summer student, Marie-Lyne Desprès-Einspenner. We did the simple experiment of putting individual females in Petri dishes painted white, black, or black on one side and white on the other.
Painted dishes housing spined soldier bug females [right], along with a mate, prey, and some green bean [opened dish shown on the left]. (Photos: Paul Abram)
So, individual stink bugs can lay eggs of a range of colours, depending on where they are laying. Our next question was: how does this capability express itself on natural laying surfaces? We did some experiments using soybean plants, and figured out what seems to be the key to this whole thing: the stink bugs have a very strong tendency to lay darker-coloured egg masses on the tops of leaves (which have a relatively low surface brightness, like our black dishes), and lighter-coloured masses on leaf undersides (which have a high surface brightness due to light passing through from above, similar to the lids of our white dishes).
A light egg mass laid on a leaf underside (upper panel), and a dark egg mass laid on a leaf top (lower panel). Photo credit: Leslie Abram.
Because leaves are excellent filters of ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun (protecting most insect eggs, which are usually laid on leaf undersides), and dark pigmentation often acts as a ‘sunscreen’ in nature, we wondered if dark colouration would protect developing stink bug eggs from a lethal sunburn when they are laid on the tops of leaves. Eric Guerra-Grenier (another undergraduate researcher in the lab) and I tested this in the lab by exposing differently coloured eggs to different doses of sun-mimicking UV radiation.
The results were crystal clear – darker eggs are better-protected from UV radiation than light eggs, with a strong dose-dependency with respect to UV radiation intensity and egg colouration.
This was an exciting find, but begged the question: what is the pigment that makes eggs dark, anyway? The clear answer was that it must be melanin, which is responsible for most dark animal pigmentation, including in us humans, and is also really good at protecting against UV radiation damage.
Eric and I did the obvious thing, sending hundreds of (freezer-killed) stink bug eggs to two melanin biochemists in Japan. Our collaborators ran a suite of tests to confirm that the egg pigment was melanin. But…it turned out that the egg pigment wasn’t melanin! Right now, we simply don’t know what this “mystery pigment” is (maybe something totally new to science?).
As is common in research, we are left with more questions than answers. What is the physiological mechanism that allows stink bugs to selectively apply pigment to eggs? In evolutionary terms, why lay eggs on UV-exposed leaf tops in the first place? And why still lay some light eggs on leaf undersides? Could the pigment also have a role in camouflage, thermoregulation, or water retention? Do other, closely related (or why not distantly-related) insect species also have this capacity? We’re currently working on some of these questions, and I hope that we get to try to answer all of them eventually.
If you’d like, you can find a lot more details about our findings, including the answer to “does UV radiation affect the control of egg colour?”, in a newly published paper (remember to listen to the accompanying song while reading) – and stay tuned for more results in the coming months.
In the meantime, fellow entomologists and naturalists, look closely at insect eggs – is there anything interesting about how they’re coloured/patterned?
A spined soldier bug female having a drink and contemplating the future of insect egg colour research (Photo credit: Leslie Abram)
Postscript:
I would like to suggest additional Pink Floyd song/entomology paper pairings (feel free to suggest your own!):
“Breathe” // “Active Regulation of Insect Respiration”
“Run Like Hell” // “Mechanics of a rapid running insect: two-, four- and six-legged locomotion”
“Mother” // “Parental care trade-offs and the role of filial cannibalism in the maritime earwig, Anisolabis maritima«
“Echoes” // “The adaptive significance of host location by vibrational sounding in parasitoid wasps”
“Time” // “Short interval time measurement by a parasitoid wasp”
“Us and Them” // “Boundary disputes in the territorial ant Azteca trigona: effects of asymmetries in colony size”
“Comfortably Numb” // ”Effects of carbon dioxide anaesthesia on Drosophila melanogaster”
By Celina Baines
Have you ever thought about what a pond-dwelling insect might do if it doesn’t like the pond it lives in? People generally assume that these insects are stuck where they are, but actually, many freshwater insects have wings and can fly. This movement between ponds is an example of a process known as dispersal.
Backswimmers, for example, are insects that live in ponds and streams (and sometimes even swimming pools!). Backswimmers have a characteristic way of swimming – on their backs, just under the surface of the water, using their hind legs to propel themselves. It makes them look a little like they are doing the backstroke (hence their common name!). But they also have wings, and can fly between ponds.
A top view of a backswimmer swimming. Backswimmers can often be seen swimming just under the surface of the water, ventral side up. Photo credit: Shannon McCauley.
We know from observing these insects that not all backswimmers make the same decisions about whether to disperse. Some individuals spend their whole lives in the ponds they are born in, and some individuals move to new ponds. So why do some individuals stay and some leave? One factor that could influence dispersal decisions is the quality of the pond. Pond “quality” could depend on many things, including the risk of being eaten by predators like fish. Dispersing can be a great way for organisms to avoid habitats that will be bad for them or their offspring.
Once a backswimmer has decided that it wants to disperse, it then has to decide whether it is strong and healthy enough to fly. This could be another factor that determines whether an individual decides to stay or go.
In the summer of 2013, I conducted a field experiment to learn more about how backswimmers make dispersal decisions. I wanted to test whether dispersal was induced by fish. I also wanted to test whether body condition (basically, the general strength and health of an organism) influences dispersal decisions.
I started by collecting backswimmers from a pond at the Koffler Scientific Reserve. That’s a research site owned by the University of Toronto, where I’m a graduate student.
This is me collecting backswimmers from a pond at the Koffler Scientific Reserve. Photo credit: Chris Thomaidis.
I brought the backswimmers back to a lab at the University of Toronto. Because I wanted to test the effects of body condition on dispersal, I first had to manipulate the backswimmers so that they had different levels of body condition. I did this by carefully controlling how much food each backswimmer got to eat.
Backswimmers are carnivores, and they aren’t very picky. For this experiment, I fed them fruit flies, because it’s really easy to get lots and lots of fruit flies. So, in what turned out to be one of the most back-breakingly tedious jobs I’ve ever performed for science, I (and many uncomplaining assistants) counted out thousands of individual fruit flies to feed to the backswimmers. Each backswimmer was housed in its own little cup, and received a specific (and carefully counted) number of fruit flies to eat every day. Here’s what the hundreds of drink cups looked like, colour coded and full of bugs.
Left: Cups housing backswimmers at the University of Toronto. Right: A backswimmer in its cup.
After a few weeks of controlling the backswimmers’ diets, it was time to bring them outside to see if they would fly. I set up some artificial ponds in a big field. These “ponds” are actually just watering tanks that farmers use for cows and horses, but I added algae and artificial plants to make them more like natural ponds. Since I also wanted to test whether backswimmers are scared away by fish, I added a fish to half of the tanks. I put the fish in cages, and that way, the backswimmers could tell there was a fish in the tank (they could see and smell the fish), but the fish couldn’t actually eat the backswimmers.
This is me, checking the artificial ponds for backswimmers. Photo credit: Betty Dondertman.
Then I put the bugs in the tanks, and waited. After a couple days, I went back to the tanks and checked to see which backswimmers were still in the tanks, and which ones had flown away.
Firstly, I found that backswimmers are scared away by fish; they are more likely to disperse when a fish is in their pond.
I also found that the backswimmers with high body condition are more likely to fly, probably because they are strong fliers and have the best chance of successfully finding a new pond.
Both of these results were really cool and answered some questions for us about how backswimmers make dispersal decisions. But they might also tell us a little about how other organisms move around in natural ecosystems. Dispersers are the only individuals that can find new ponds and start new populations. If dispersers tend to be the strongest and healthiest individuals, that’s great for native species that we want to encourage to start new populations. But having strong, healthy individuals from exotic species start new populations is probably bad news. Dispersal can therefore have important consequences, which is why we need to understand more about how and why organisms disperse.
For more information about my study, check out the recent publication:
As a graduate student, publishing a paper is a big deal. After spending countless hours doing the research, slogging through the writing process, soliciting comments from co-authors, formatting the paper to meet journal guidelines, and dealing with reviewer comments, it’s nice to finally get that acceptance letter and know that your work is getting out there. The ESC Student Affairs Committee is happy to be posting a fourth roundup of papers authored by Canadian graduate students. Stay tuned to the ESC blog for some full length guest posts from some of the students below in the coming weeks!
Have a look at what some entomology grad students in Canada have been up to recently! Articles below were published online from April through June 2015.
Forestry
Seehausen et al. found that parasitism of hemlock looper Lambdina fiscellaria (Guenée) (Lepidoptera: Geometridae) pupae was significantly reduced in plots with high partial cutting intensities (40%). To sustain parasitism rates in forest stands vulnerable to hemlock looper defoliation at naturally high levels, it is recommended to refrain from high intensity partial cutting. Article link
Apechthis ontario parasitizing a hemlock looper pupa (Photo credit: Lukas Seehausen)
During its recent outbreak starting in the early 2000s, the mountain pine beetle destroyed huge areas of lodge pole pine forests in BC and Alberta while also expanding its geographic range east and north. More recently, the beetle has been confirmed to be attacking and reproducing in a novel host, jack pine, which is distributed from Alberta to the Atlantic coast. New research by Taft et al. looks at how specific chemicals in jack pine trees that affect mountain pine beetle vary in jack pine across its range. Article link
Another study from the Erbilgin lab at University of Alberta by Karst et al. revealed that stand mortality caused by prior beetle attacks of mature pines have cascading effects on seedling secondary chemistry, growth and survival, probably mediated through effects on below-ground mutualisms. Article link
Physiology and Genetics
Proshek, Dupuis, et al. found the genetic diversity of Mormon Metalmark species complex are more diverse than traditional morphological characters. Article link
A Lange Metalmark butterfly (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Oudin, Bonduriansky, and Rundle at the University of Ottawa found the amount of sexual dimorphism present in antler flies is condition-dependent. Article link
Nearby at Carleton University, Webster et al. studied the edge markings on moths to show they can provide camouflage by breaking up their body outline. Article link
Another study from Carleton University, from Hossie et al., showed that predator-deterring eyespots tend to appear on larger-bodied caterpillars and that smaller species are better off remaining undetected. Check out the detailed blog post about this study on the lead author’s blog, and a great photo gallery of caterpillars with eyespots! And here’s the link to the Article.
Jakobs, Gariepy, and Sinclair established that adult phenotypic plasticity is not sufficient to allow Drosophila suzukii to overwinter in temperate habitats. Article link
Insect Management
Part of the PhD work of Angela Gradish focused on the White Mountain arctic butterfly (WMA), a very rare butterfly occurring only on the alpine zone of Mts. Washington and Jefferson in New Hampshire. Despite its threatened status, little was known of the WMA’s population structure, distribution, and behaviour. So Gradish grabbed a net and headed up Mt. Washington, where she spent part of two summers collecting WMA samples for genetic analyses while performing a mark-release-recapture study on the population. She was the first to use genetic analyses to study the WMA, the results of which are presented here. Find the results of the mark-release-recapture study here.
Collecting butterflies on Mount Washington (photo credit: Angela Gradish).
Marshall and Paiero, from the Marshall lab at University of Guelph, gives a new record of a Palaearctic leaf beetle, Cassida viridis, which has been present in Ontario since 1974. Article link
Maguire et al., from the Buddle lab at McGill University, found destructive insect herbivores can positively or negatively impact ecosystem services depending on outbreak conditions. Article link
Biodiversity
Ernst and Buddle discovered that the diversity and assemblage structure of northern carabid beetles show strong latitudinal gradients due to the mediating effects of climate, particularly temperature. Article link
Behaviour and Ecology
The Luong lab at University of Alberta observed that ectoparasitic mites have deleterious effects on host flight performance of Drosophila species. Article link
Therrien et al. from the Erbilgin lab at the University of Alberta found that bacteria can influence brood development of bark beetles in host tissue. Article link
Desai, Kumar, and Currie from the Currie lab at the University of Manitoba conducted the first major baseline study of viruses in Canadian honey bees to show that deformed wing virus has the highest concentration among worker bees. Article link
Baines, McCauley, and Rowe from the Rowe lab at University of Toronto showed that dispersal is a positive function of body condition in backswimmers, but not interactive with predation risk. Article link
Backswimmers can often be seen swimming just under the surface of the water, ventral side up (Photo credit: Shannon McCauley).
Strepsiptera is a peculiar and enigmatic insect order. All are entomophagous endoparasitoids. Unusually for parasitoids, they possess a very broad host range, encompassing 7 orders and 34 families of insects, in various habitats worldwide. Despite their broad host range, and cosmopolitan distribution, surprisingly little is known about their biology. The gaps in knowledge of this group has led to many generalizations about their biology and behaviour. Only recently are studies beginning to uncover a hitherto unforeseen diversity in reproductive strategies. In this review, Kathirithamby, Hrabar, and colleagues discuss the reproductive biology of Strepsiptera: what is known, and what mysteries remain to be solved. Article link
In the Sargent lab at University of Ottawa, Russell-Mercier and Sargent investigated herbivore-mediated differences in floral display traits and found that they impacted pollinator visitation behaviour, but not in female reproductive success. Article link
Techniques
Can you use gut content DNA analysis of a staphilinid beetle to track predation of spotted wing drosophila? Here’s what Renkema et al. found.
Rosati et al., from the Vanlaerhoven lab at University of Windsor, discuss using ImageJ software to quantify blow fly egg deposition in a non-destructive manner. Article link
We are continuing to help publicize graduate student publications to the wider entomological community through our Research Roundup. Find the previous edition here: http://escsecblog.com/2015/05/04/canadian-entomology-research-roundup-march-2015-april-2015/. If you published an article recently and would like it featured, e-mail us at entsoccan.students@gmail.com. You can also send us photos and short descriptions of your research, to appear in a later edition of the research roundup.
For regular updates on new Canadian entomological research, you can join the ESC Students Facebook page or follow us on Twitter @esc_students.
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