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Bug Lover Twigs to How Twig Borers Make Love
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Contact:
Melanie Hart, 604.291.5939 (lab), mhart@sfu.ca
Marianne Meadahl/Julie Ovenell-Carter, Media & PR, 604.291.4323
Melanie Hart, 604.291.5939 (lab), mhart@sfu.ca
Marianne Meadahl/Julie Ovenell-Carter, Media & PR, 604.291.4323
June 13, 2006
Simon Fraser University graduand Melanie Hart is known as an eccentric among her lab mates because of her ever-expanding insect zoo, perched above her workbench. The zoo has become a refuge for more than 100 multi-legged creatures that are no longer useful to her colleagues. “I’ve been in love with bugs since the age of five, when I got one of my most memorable birthday gifts — a bug catcher,” says Hart.
But this budding entomologist’s attraction to insects is raising as many academic eyebrows as it is amusing her peers. She has just completed her master’s degree in biology. Under the supervision of Gerhard Gries, internationally renowned for his understanding of chemical and bioacoustic communication between insects, Hart has been researching what prompts peach twig borers to have sex.
The tiny but destructive two-centimetre long moths disfigure orchards, devaluing almonds and making fruits vulnerable to juice-sucking wasps. After two years of trial-and-error experiments at Ambercott Acres, an organic fruit orchard in the B.C. Interior, Hart discovered, for the first time, sound communication in the gelechiid moth family.
For these barely visible pests, getting together to copulate requires more than the male using his sense of smell, like most moths, to pick up female sex pheromones (message-bearing chemical compounds). Twig borers engage in an elaborate courtship involving the emission of sex pheromones and sounds that enable males and females to pinpoint each other’s location in vast orchards. Bioacoustic communication was previously unknown among these moths.
Hart, who convocates on June 9, is helping Phero Tech International develop a product that uses her research to disrupt peach twig borer mating sounds and control their orchard infestations. Phero Tech, an SFU spin-off company in Delta, invents and distributes products using message-bearing insect chemicals to control pests. Hart, a Coquitlam resident born in Courtenay, loves teaching as much as she loves bugs; she has won a 2005-2006 faculty of science excellence in teaching award.
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(electronic photo file available on request)
But this budding entomologist’s attraction to insects is raising as many academic eyebrows as it is amusing her peers. She has just completed her master’s degree in biology. Under the supervision of Gerhard Gries, internationally renowned for his understanding of chemical and bioacoustic communication between insects, Hart has been researching what prompts peach twig borers to have sex.
The tiny but destructive two-centimetre long moths disfigure orchards, devaluing almonds and making fruits vulnerable to juice-sucking wasps. After two years of trial-and-error experiments at Ambercott Acres, an organic fruit orchard in the B.C. Interior, Hart discovered, for the first time, sound communication in the gelechiid moth family.
For these barely visible pests, getting together to copulate requires more than the male using his sense of smell, like most moths, to pick up female sex pheromones (message-bearing chemical compounds). Twig borers engage in an elaborate courtship involving the emission of sex pheromones and sounds that enable males and females to pinpoint each other’s location in vast orchards. Bioacoustic communication was previously unknown among these moths.
Hart, who convocates on June 9, is helping Phero Tech International develop a product that uses her research to disrupt peach twig borer mating sounds and control their orchard infestations. Phero Tech, an SFU spin-off company in Delta, invents and distributes products using message-bearing insect chemicals to control pests. Hart, a Coquitlam resident born in Courtenay, loves teaching as much as she loves bugs; she has won a 2005-2006 faculty of science excellence in teaching award.
—30—
(electronic photo file available on request)