The Pest Management Centre compiles the Pest Management Research Report (PMRR) for the Canadian Phytopathological Society (CPS), in conjunction with the Entomological Society of Canada. The PMRR facilitates the exchange of information on Integrated Pest Management (IPM) among persons involved in research and advisory services on IPM of insect pests and plant diseases of importance to the agri-food industry in Canada.
The PMRR is published annually as a compilation of research reports by federal and provincial government, university and industry research and advisory personnel. These reports aid the development of recommendations for insect and disease management programs throughout Canada. They report on all aspects of pest management, including cultivar and management responses, and are available to support the registration of pest control products. The PMRR is published only in electronic format. The 1995-2018 editions of the PMRR are available on the CPS website for viewing and download at http://phytopath.ca/publication/pmrr/.
Please find the invitation to submit research reports for the 2019 edition of the PMRR. Also encourage any of your colleagues who conduct research into IPM to submit research reports.
http://esc-sec.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ESC_logo-300x352.png00Jordan Bannermanhttp://esc-sec.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ESC_logo-300x352.pngJordan Bannerman2019-09-04 16:54:432019-11-14 21:37:152019 Pest Management Research Report – call for submissions
Do insects feel pain? Many of us probably ask ourselves this question. We swat mosquitoes, step on ants, and spray poison on cockroaches, assuming, or perhaps hoping, that they can’t – but can they? As someone who studies the physiology behind insect behaviour, I’ve wondered about it myself. Those thoughts motivated me to examine the question from the perspective of evolution, neurobiology and robotics.
Are these crickets angry? In pain from being whipped by antennae? How would we know?
To find out whether insects feel pain, we first need to agree on what pain is. Pain is a personal subjective experience that includes negative emotions. Pain is different from nociception, which is the ability to respond to damaging stimuli. All organisms have nociception. Even bacteria can move away from harmful environments such as high pH. But not all animals feel pain. The question, then, is do insects have subjective experiences such as emotions and the ability to feel pain?
We’ve probably all observed insects struggling in a spider’s web or writhing after being sprayed with insecticide; they look like they might be in pain. Insects can also learn to avoid electric shocks, suggesting that they don’t like being shocked. However, just as I was appreciating how much some insect behaviour looked like our pain behaviour, I realized that Artificial Intelligence (e.g. robots and virtual characters) can also display similar behaviours (e.g. see (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxyGwH7Ku5Y). Think about how virtual characters can realistically express pain in video games such as “The Last of Us” (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQWD5W3fpPM). Researchers have developed circuits allowing robots and other AI to simulate emotional states (e.g. ‘joy’, ‘anger’, ‘fear’). These circuits alter how the robot/virtual character responds to its environment (i.e. the same stimulus produces a different response depending on the AI’s ‘emotion’). However, this does not mean that robots or virtual characters are ‘feeling’ these emotions. AI shows us that behaviour may not be the best guide to an insect’s internal experience.
Given that behaviour seemed an unreliable guide, I then looked for neurobiological evidence that insects feel pain. Unfortunately, the insect brain is very different from the human brain. However, once we understand how our brains perceive pain, we may be able to search for circuits that are functionally similar in insects. Research in humans suggests that pain perception is created by complex neural networks that link up the necessary brain areas. These types of networks require massive bidirectional connections across multiple brain regions. Insect brains also have interconnections across different brain areas. However, these interconnections are often quite modest. For example, the mushroom bodies in the insect brain are critical for learning and memory. Although the mushroom bodies contain thousands of neurons, in fruit flies, for example, they have only 21 output neurons. In humans, our memory area, the hippocampus, has hundreds of thousands of output neurons. The lack of output neurons in insects limits the ability of the insect brain to sew together the traits that create pain in us (e.g. sensory information, memory, and emotion).
Finally, I considered the question from an evolutionary perspective. How likely it is that evolution would select for insects to feel pain? In evolution, traits evolve if the benefits of a trait outweigh its costs. Unfortunately, nervous systems are expensive for animals. Insects have a small, economical, nervous system. Additional neurons dedicated to an ‘emotional’ neural circuit would be relatively expensive in terms of energetics and resources. If it is possible to produce the same behaviour without the cost, then evolution will select for the cheaper option. Robots show that there could be cheaper ways.
The subjective experience of pain is unlikely to be an all-or-none phenomenon. Asking whether insects feel pain forces us to consider what we would accept as a subjective experience of pain. What if it was devoid of emotional content? What if cognition is not involved? If insects have any type of subjective experience of pain, it is likely to be something that will be very different from our pain experience. It is likely to lack key features such as ‘distress’, ‘sadness’, and other states that require the synthesis of emotion, memory and cognition. In other words, insects are unlikely to feel pain as we understand it. So – should we still swat mosquitoes? Probably, but a case can be made that all animals deserve our respect, regardless of their ability to feel pain.
Adamo, S. (2019). Is it pain if it does not hurt? On the unlikelihood of insect pain. The Canadian Entomologist, 1-11. doi:10.4039/tce.2019.49 (Paper made available to read for FREE until Sept. 16, 2019 in cooperation with Cambridge University Press)
Help us monitor for box tree moth, an invasive species recently detected in Toronto and not known to occur anywhere else in North America.
Express your interest to Erin.Bullas-Appleton@canada.ca by April 20, 2019 and be ready to join us at the launch event taking place at James Gardens, Etobicoke on May 9th, 2019.
A common eastern bumble bee male on a flower. Photo by Brett Forsyth.
There’s been a buzz in the air about bees lately, and for good reason: bees are major pollinators of both wild plants and agricultural crops, and some species are declining because of threats like habitat loss, climate change, and agricultural intensification. Many people assume the honey bee is the top pollinator among bees. But bumble bees, the honey bee’s bigger, hairier, and louder cousins, are just as important for pollination*. (For some plants, bumble bees are even better pollinators than honey bees.) North America is home to 46 bumble bee species that collectively visit hundreds of types of plants. Also, a few bumble bee species are commercially reared and sold to growers to pollinate certain crops, like blueberries and greenhouse tomatoes. Unfortunately, some bumble bee species are declining or endangered, and the status of many other species is unknown. Bumble bees are historically understudied, and so for some areas, there aren’t many bumble bee records (documented sightings of individual bumble bees with associated reference information, like sighting location, date, and species name). Without good records, it’s difficult to know how many individuals of certain bumble bee species there are now and how large their geographic range is, and how their population sizes and ranges may have changed over time. Brett Forsyth, a photographer and naturalist from Guelph, hopes to help address this problem and raise awareness about bumble bees with his new online project, Photographing Bumble Bees for Identification.
A pinned rusty-patched bumble bee, an endangered species in Ontario. Photo by Brett Forsyth.
Originally from British Columbia, Brett became interested in bumble bee conservation when he moved to Ontario. Currently, there are three bumble bees on the Species at Risk in Ontario list: the rusty-patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis, endangered), the gypsy cuckoo bumble bee (Bombus bohemicus, endangered), and the yellow-banded bumble bee (Bombus terricola, special concern). Brett decided to figure out how to photograph these at-risk species, and in the process, he discovered that there are relatively poor records of many Ontario bumble bees, especially in the northern and central areas of the province.
Brett saw a way to improve our knowledge of Ontario bumble bees** via iNaturalist, an existing online citizen science project aimed at documenting and sharing observations of global biodiversity. Users create free profiles and upload photos of their biodiversity finds, where they can then be viewed by other users and identified by experts. iNaturalist educates people about the natural world, but it also can provide scientists with valuable data that can be used to track changes to species’ geographic distributions and population sizes. For those data to be useful, the species in the uploaded photos must be identifiable, which requires high-quality images that contain key body structures needed to identify the organism. But as anyone who’s ever tried will tell you, getting a bumble bee to sit still for a picture is tricky. As a photographer, Brett saw an obvious solution to that problem: simply teach people to take good pictures of bumble bees with their mobile devices, and in turn, get better data on Ontario bumble bees.
Pocket guide to photographing bumble bees by Brett Forsyth.
In a series of videos on the Photographing Bumble Bees website, Brett takes viewers step-by-step through the process of taking pictures of bumble bees and uploading their photos to the Bumble Bees of Ontario project on iNaturalist. He also provides a free, printable pocket guide that outlines the most important tips for photographing bumble bees and gives descriptions of the three at-risk species in Ontario. Brett has four general tips for getting great pictures of bumble bees. First, get as close as you can to the bumble bee. (Don’t be scared of that stinger–bumble bees really aren’t very aggressive!) Second, get separate shots of the bumble bee’s back, side, and face. These areas contain features that are important for identifying bumble bees. Third, slow motion video can be used to get good images of fast-moving insects because it produces a bunch of still images that you can sort through later to find the perfect shot. And fourth, find an app that will allow you to manually focus your phone’s camera.
Brett hopes his project will inspire 250 people to join the Bumble Bees of Ontario project on iNaturalist and generate at least 1,000 new bumble bee records from central and northern Ontario. More generally, he wants to get more people interested in bumble bees and the underappreciated world of insects. So help scientists help bumble bees: Grab your phone, get outside, and start snapping photos.
*This article is focused on bumble bees, but there are many other types of bees. In fact, there are around 4000 species of bees in Canada and the US. All of those bee are also very important pollinators, and many of them may also be at risk. (We know even less about other bees than bumble bees.) So please learn about other bees too!
**Maybe you’re not in Ontario, but don’t let that stop you from using these tips to photograph bumble bees in your area. Information on any bumble bee species from anywhere is important!
https://esc-sec.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/B_impatiens_close.jpg10671600Angela Gradishhttp://esc-sec.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ESC_logo-300x352.pngAngela Gradish2019-04-03 11:22:442020-10-30 21:12:54Say Bees! How Not to Bumble Your Bee Photography
Abstract submission deadline for this workshop in Quebec City (8 to 11 July) is now extended to 1 April, 2019.
General Topic:
Population dynamics of forest insects
Integrated management of forest defoliating insects
Session topics will include Ecology and dynamics of forest insects, Climate change impacts, Interactions between disturbance agents, Invasive species, Integrated management strategies and Forest health. If you are interested in participating, please download the Abstract Submission Form at: https://www.iufroqc2019.com/abstracts. Early-bird registration is until 15 April
We look forward to seeing you in Quebec City.
Jean-Noel Candau, Deepa Pureswaran, Andrea Battisti and Manuela Branco, Working group co-ordinators
2019 Pest Management Research Report – call for submissions
Dear Researchers in Integrated Pest Management,
The Pest Management Centre compiles the Pest Management Research Report (PMRR) for the Canadian Phytopathological Society (CPS), in conjunction with the Entomological Society of Canada. The PMRR facilitates the exchange of information on Integrated Pest Management (IPM) among persons involved in research and advisory services on IPM of insect pests and plant diseases of importance to the agri-food industry in Canada.
The PMRR is published annually as a compilation of research reports by federal and provincial government, university and industry research and advisory personnel. These reports aid the development of recommendations for insect and disease management programs throughout Canada. They report on all aspects of pest management, including cultivar and management responses, and are available to support the registration of pest control products. The PMRR is published only in electronic format. The 1995-2018 editions of the PMRR are available on the CPS website for viewing and download at http://phytopath.ca/publication/pmrr/.
Please find the invitation to submit research reports for the 2019 edition of the PMRR. Also encourage any of your colleagues who conduct research into IPM to submit research reports.
Do Insects Feel Pain?
By Dr. Shelley Adamo, Dalhousie University
Do insects feel pain? Many of us probably ask ourselves this question. We swat mosquitoes, step on ants, and spray poison on cockroaches, assuming, or perhaps hoping, that they can’t – but can they? As someone who studies the physiology behind insect behaviour, I’ve wondered about it myself. Those thoughts motivated me to examine the question from the perspective of evolution, neurobiology and robotics.
Are these crickets angry? In pain from being whipped by antennae? How would we know?
To find out whether insects feel pain, we first need to agree on what pain is. Pain is a personal subjective experience that includes negative emotions. Pain is different from nociception, which is the ability to respond to damaging stimuli. All organisms have nociception. Even bacteria can move away from harmful environments such as high pH. But not all animals feel pain. The question, then, is do insects have subjective experiences such as emotions and the ability to feel pain?
We’ve probably all observed insects struggling in a spider’s web or writhing after being sprayed with insecticide; they look like they might be in pain. Insects can also learn to avoid electric shocks, suggesting that they don’t like being shocked. However, just as I was appreciating how much some insect behaviour looked like our pain behaviour, I realized that Artificial Intelligence (e.g. robots and virtual characters) can also display similar behaviours (e.g. see (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxyGwH7Ku5Y). Think about how virtual characters can realistically express pain in video games such as “The Last of Us” (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQWD5W3fpPM). Researchers have developed circuits allowing robots and other AI to simulate emotional states (e.g. ‘joy’, ‘anger’, ‘fear’). These circuits alter how the robot/virtual character responds to its environment (i.e. the same stimulus produces a different response depending on the AI’s ‘emotion’). However, this does not mean that robots or virtual characters are ‘feeling’ these emotions. AI shows us that behaviour may not be the best guide to an insect’s internal experience.
Given that behaviour seemed an unreliable guide, I then looked for neurobiological evidence that insects feel pain. Unfortunately, the insect brain is very different from the human brain. However, once we understand how our brains perceive pain, we may be able to search for circuits that are functionally similar in insects. Research in humans suggests that pain perception is created by complex neural networks that link up the necessary brain areas. These types of networks require massive bidirectional connections across multiple brain regions. Insect brains also have interconnections across different brain areas. However, these interconnections are often quite modest. For example, the mushroom bodies in the insect brain are critical for learning and memory. Although the mushroom bodies contain thousands of neurons, in fruit flies, for example, they have only 21 output neurons. In humans, our memory area, the hippocampus, has hundreds of thousands of output neurons. The lack of output neurons in insects limits the ability of the insect brain to sew together the traits that create pain in us (e.g. sensory information, memory, and emotion).
Finally, I considered the question from an evolutionary perspective. How likely it is that evolution would select for insects to feel pain? In evolution, traits evolve if the benefits of a trait outweigh its costs. Unfortunately, nervous systems are expensive for animals. Insects have a small, economical, nervous system. Additional neurons dedicated to an ‘emotional’ neural circuit would be relatively expensive in terms of energetics and resources. If it is possible to produce the same behaviour without the cost, then evolution will select for the cheaper option. Robots show that there could be cheaper ways.
The subjective experience of pain is unlikely to be an all-or-none phenomenon. Asking whether insects feel pain forces us to consider what we would accept as a subjective experience of pain. What if it was devoid of emotional content? What if cognition is not involved? If insects have any type of subjective experience of pain, it is likely to be something that will be very different from our pain experience. It is likely to lack key features such as ‘distress’, ‘sadness’, and other states that require the synthesis of emotion, memory and cognition. In other words, insects are unlikely to feel pain as we understand it. So – should we still swat mosquitoes? Probably, but a case can be made that all animals deserve our respect, regardless of their ability to feel pain.
Adamo, S. (2019). Is it pain if it does not hurt? On the unlikelihood of insect pain. The Canadian Entomologist, 1-11. doi:10.4039/tce.2019.49 (Paper made available to read for FREE until Sept. 16, 2019 in cooperation with Cambridge University Press)
Calling all Ontario Citizen Scientists
Help us monitor for box tree moth, an invasive species recently detected in Toronto and not known to occur anywhere else in North America.
Express your interest to Erin.Bullas-Appleton@canada.ca by April 20, 2019 and be ready to join us at the launch event taking place at James Gardens, Etobicoke on May 9th, 2019.
For more information visit:
https://www.eddmaps.org/ontario/Species/subject.cfm?sub=62133
http://inspection.gc.ca/plants/plant-pests-invasive-species/insects/box-treemoth/eng/1554215562798/1554215563084
Say Bees!
How Not to Bumble Your Bee Photography
by Angela Gradish
A common eastern bumble bee male on a flower. Photo by Brett Forsyth.
There’s been a buzz in the air about bees lately, and for good reason: bees are major pollinators of both wild plants and agricultural crops, and some species are declining because of threats like habitat loss, climate change, and agricultural intensification. Many people assume the honey bee is the top pollinator among bees. But bumble bees, the honey bee’s bigger, hairier, and louder cousins, are just as important for pollination*. (For some plants, bumble bees are even better pollinators than honey bees.) North America is home to 46 bumble bee species that collectively visit hundreds of types of plants. Also, a few bumble bee species are commercially reared and sold to growers to pollinate certain crops, like blueberries and greenhouse tomatoes. Unfortunately, some bumble bee species are declining or endangered, and the status of many other species is unknown. Bumble bees are historically understudied, and so for some areas, there aren’t many bumble bee records (documented sightings of individual bumble bees with associated reference information, like sighting location, date, and species name). Without good records, it’s difficult to know how many individuals of certain bumble bee species there are now and how large their geographic range is, and how their population sizes and ranges may have changed over time. Brett Forsyth, a photographer and naturalist from Guelph, hopes to help address this problem and raise awareness about bumble bees with his new online project, Photographing Bumble Bees for Identification.
A pinned rusty-patched bumble bee, an endangered species in Ontario. Photo by Brett Forsyth.
Originally from British Columbia, Brett became interested in bumble bee conservation when he moved to Ontario. Currently, there are three bumble bees on the Species at Risk in Ontario list: the rusty-patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis, endangered), the gypsy cuckoo bumble bee (Bombus bohemicus, endangered), and the yellow-banded bumble bee (Bombus terricola, special concern). Brett decided to figure out how to photograph these at-risk species, and in the process, he discovered that there are relatively poor records of many Ontario bumble bees, especially in the northern and central areas of the province.
Brett saw a way to improve our knowledge of Ontario bumble bees** via iNaturalist, an existing online citizen science project aimed at documenting and sharing observations of global biodiversity. Users create free profiles and upload photos of their biodiversity finds, where they can then be viewed by other users and identified by experts. iNaturalist educates people about the natural world, but it also can provide scientists with valuable data that can be used to track changes to species’ geographic distributions and population sizes. For those data to be useful, the species in the uploaded photos must be identifiable, which requires high-quality images that contain key body structures needed to identify the organism. But as anyone who’s ever tried will tell you, getting a bumble bee to sit still for a picture is tricky. As a photographer, Brett saw an obvious solution to that problem: simply teach people to take good pictures of bumble bees with their mobile devices, and in turn, get better data on Ontario bumble bees.
Pocket guide to photographing bumble bees by Brett Forsyth.
In a series of videos on the Photographing Bumble Bees website, Brett takes viewers step-by-step through the process of taking pictures of bumble bees and uploading their photos to the Bumble Bees of Ontario project on iNaturalist. He also provides a free, printable pocket guide that outlines the most important tips for photographing bumble bees and gives descriptions of the three at-risk species in Ontario. Brett has four general tips for getting great pictures of bumble bees. First, get as close as you can to the bumble bee. (Don’t be scared of that stinger–bumble bees really aren’t very aggressive!) Second, get separate shots of the bumble bee’s back, side, and face. These areas contain features that are important for identifying bumble bees. Third, slow motion video can be used to get good images of fast-moving insects because it produces a bunch of still images that you can sort through later to find the perfect shot. And fourth, find an app that will allow you to manually focus your phone’s camera.
Brett hopes his project will inspire 250 people to join the Bumble Bees of Ontario project on iNaturalist and generate at least 1,000 new bumble bee records from central and northern Ontario. More generally, he wants to get more people interested in bumble bees and the underappreciated world of insects. So help scientists help bumble bees: Grab your phone, get outside, and start snapping photos.
*This article is focused on bumble bees, but there are many other types of bees. In fact, there are around 4000 species of bees in Canada and the US. All of those bee are also very important pollinators, and many of them may also be at risk. (We know even less about other bees than bumble bees.) So please learn about other bees too!
**Maybe you’re not in Ontario, but don’t let that stop you from using these tips to photograph bumble bees in your area. Information on any bumble bee species from anywhere is important!
How Not to Bumble Your Bee Photography
Population Dynamics of Forest Insects and Integrated Management of Forest Defoliators Workshop
Abstract submission deadline for this workshop in Quebec City (8 to 11 July) is now extended to 1 April, 2019.
General Topic:
Session topics will include Ecology and dynamics of forest insects, Climate change impacts, Interactions between disturbance agents, Invasive species, Integrated management strategies and Forest health. If you are interested in participating, please download the Abstract Submission Form at: https://www.iufroqc2019.com/abstracts. Early-bird registration is until 15 April
We look forward to seeing you in Quebec City.
Jean-Noel Candau, Deepa Pureswaran, Andrea Battisti and Manuela Branco, Working group co-ordinators