Entomology

My entomology career might be summarized in key words for the projects I've done: Colorado potato beetle; Japanese beetle; European chafer; entomopathogenic nematodes; greenhouse biocontrol. My last major effort (2002–2010) was the emerald ash borer, an invasive insect that will likely make ash an uncommon species in North American forests. I've written or co-authored 33 papers on these various topics. 

Pollination and bees

In 2019-2021 I did field work at  the Institute for Applied Ecology in Corvallis, Oregon. The work (if you can call it that) involved many hours of sitting in pristine meadows and observing pollinators and their relationship to flowers as they appear and senesce over the season. A particular focus was the endangered Willamette daisy (see a couple of our pubs here and here). Susan Waters was one of the collaborators in this work; I remain an associate of her company, Quamash EcoResearch.     

In 2024 I retired and moved back to Michigan, where I work on taxonomy and public education on topics of biodiversity.  

One of our Oregon prairie sites; Willamette daisy in the foreground.

Halictus tripartitis on Willamette daisy. Quamash EcoResearch in the field. Susan on the left.

Emerald ash borer

There is an obvious downside to an invasive pest that eliminates a major hardwood species across North America. The upside was lots of funding, and an opportunity for research on every aspect of EAB biology. I worked as a contractor to Mich State, for Deb McCullough. Therese Poland of USFS was a key collaborator.     Our main tools were climbing ropes, and chainsaws. I never wore a white lab coat.

Inset is a "window" — an area of the trunk where you chisel through the bark and count the larvae by life stage. To get a representative sample, we would take samples throughout the trunk and canopy.

The larva is the damaging stage of EAB. To sample them, you have to climb trees, or cut them down.

Nate Siegert, now of USFS, led a project to map and model ash and borer populations in mid-Michigan wilderness. We tagged every tree in several square kilometers, and felled and dissected perhaps 1000. Generally in the winter. Or in the swampy, or mosquito seasons.

Nate Siegert, now of USFS, led a project to map and model ash and borer populations in mid-Michigan wilderness. We tagged every tree in several square kilometers, and felled and dissected perhaps 1000. Generally in the winter. Or in the swampy, or mosquito seasons.

I worked as a contractor to Mich State, for Deb McCullough. Therese Poland of USFS was a key collaborator.

Atanycolus cappaerti In 2007, I was dissecting like my 10,000th sample, and I found dead EAB larvae, with attached parasitoids, and wasp cocoons. The mortality was widespread. When we reared out the parasitoids, we got this braconid wasp. It had been unobserved for the first 8 years of EAB research, and then appeared in abundance at several Michigan sites. It was a close relative of the dozen or so Atanycolus species, but our taxonomist Paul Marsh christened it as a new species, A. cappaerti. I did not select the name, but I like it.

Above: A. cappaerti Below, The other occasion I had to describe a new species. It turns out that many arthropods host gut microbes called gregarines. We don't generally know what they do — parasite or commensal. In a survey of Japanese beetle pathogens, we found lots of gregarines of an undescribed species. We named it after a scarab researcher, Mike Villani: Stictospora villani.