Research
My overall research goals aim to better understand invasive species biology and its effect on ecology and agriculture in order to suggest novel methods of managing new threats. My research has stretched from highly molecular methods designing QPCR primers to population-level studies in order to understand the factors influencing invasive species biology at a macro scale.
Current Research
My current research focuses on developing short- and long-term integrated pest management strategies to control a recent invasive fruit fly pest, spotted wing drosophila (SWD). Due to ongoing activities in science communication and outreach in addition to my research plan, I awarded an NSF-Graduate Research Fellowship to conduct this research.
Since SWD directly attacks fruit of berry and cherry plants, it’s responsible for a zero-tolerance policy among fruit purchasers who will return any fruit shipments with evidence of infestation (typically larger-size maggots) found within fruit, causing major economic loss and environmental concerns of large quantities of food wasted. I studied a postharvest cold storage treatment that could be used to control known, low-level infestations on small commercial farms in order to reduce survivorship of SWD at early life stages (egg and small maggot phase) before they severely damaged fruit and get flagged at quality control by fruit purchasers. This provides an immediate solution that growers can begin to use to reduce food waste and economic damage by salvaging fruit with low level infestations of SWD after using pre-existing management tactics including pesticides and thorough picking. This research is in the final stages of publication and also includes an economic tool to estimate the cost of purchasing a cold storage unit built by collaborators at Cornell to enhance the extension outcomes for this applied research.
I am also studying adult SWD movement and biology with long-term management potential. I have designed a set of QPCR Melt Curve primers to detect presence of blueberry, strawberry, and caneberry DNA in adult SWD guts. I have conducted laboratory assays to determine how long fruit remains in the gut after a single feeding as well as how long that DNA is retained in flies held in trap fluid to help inform field methods. I then trapped SWD at increasing distances from host plant plots into non-host landscape in order to better understand how far adult flies are moving by using their berry feeding behavior as a marker of distance moved.
Past Research
I studied how pea aphid endosymbionts mediate the interaction between two parasitoid wasps, one native and one a classical biocontrol agent introduced to manage invasive pea aphid populations. I used standard PCR and gel electrophoresis protocol to confirm facultative symbiont infection within pea aphids. Then, I set up population cage studies with four organisms (plants, aphids, and two wasp species) at specific life stages and followed parasitism proportion over time while continuing to re-set the population cage study with freshly grown pea aphids and wasps of appropriate life stage weekly. In the population cage study experiment, we found that even levels as low as 10% of a defensive facultative symbiont within the aphid population could serve as a reservoir protecting communities of native parasitoid wasps which may have a spill-over effect into other arthropod communities in adjacent ecosystems.
In addition, I conducted a parasitism assay by evaluating multiparasitism (two species of wasp each laying an egg in the same host) of the two wasp species into hosts with and without the defensive symbiont and found that while the symbiont may externally influence parasitoid competition, as seen in the population cage studies, it did not internally influence competition. Together, the research suggests that competition among wasps is largely species-specific for each interaction but likely has a strong influence on the ecology of these insect interactions.