Entomology Digest – Fall 2026

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Lab updates

UW Insect Diagnostic Lab

PJ Liesch | Lab website

I always appreciate when fall arrives, as it means that things start to slow down at the UW Insect Diagnostic Lab. Summer is my busiest season, with roughly half of the annual tally of identification requests coming in between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Things usually stay pretty busy until we get our first frost for the year. In addition to running the diagnostic lab, the summer is also a busy time for outreach. This year, Helen Oker and Morgan Weissner helped me lead the entomology major for the Grandparent’s University Program and I helped coordinate another very successful Wisconsin Insect Fest event at Olbrich gardens in late July (1,300+ attendees!).

I’ll save my favorite stories from the lab for my annual department seminar, but there was no shortage of surprises this year. Anything from unusual spiders to a new species of cockroach for the state, and an abundance of yellowjackets as August rolled around.

The busy schedule at the diagnostic lab also means needing to recharge, and this fall I had a chance to make a solo cross-island trek of Isle Royale’s Minong Ridge Trail. Of course, I was taking photographs of insects within a minute of getting off the seaplane. I had plenty of time for some of my favorite things—bushwhacking in swamps and bogs looking for biological curiosities.

2026 Wisconsin Insect Fest a Huge Success

UW-Entomology hosted another wonderful Wisconsin Insect Fest event in late July with partners at Olbrich Botanical Gardens. This was our biggest event yet, with over 1,300 attendees and spanned an entire afternoon into the evening. Wisconsin Insect Fest featured over a dozen entomology-themed booths and vendors, and eight seminars and guided walks. Speakers included our very own beetle expert, Dr. Dan Young, extraordinary photographer, Tony Shen, aquatic entomologist, Dr. Jessica Orlofske, and more. As evening rolled around, food carts offered an array of tasty dinner options, including edible insects (fried crickets, anyone?). The evening also featured a showing of The Incredible Caterpillar film, which led up to nighttime insect surveys in collaboration with National Moth Week—lots crammed into a single event.

A huge thank you to all the faculty, staff, students, and partners at Olbrich Gardens who supported Wisconsin Insect Fest and made it a success. Pulling off an outreach event of this scale is no easy feat, and I’m proud that as a department, we’ve been able to develop Wisconsin Insect Fest over the last decade.

Stay tuned to see what we come up with for the 2027 event!

Belitz Lab

Dr. Michael Belitz | Lab website

The Belitz Lab arrived on campus in August, and we’re thrilled to be launching the lab! We’re building a collaborative, interdisciplinary group that studies how insects respond to global environmental change at large scales by integrating diverse data sources.

Michael began work on an NSF-funded collaborative project quantifying the impacts of extreme weather events on insect populations with Daijiang Li (UW–Madison, Department of Biology) and colleagues at the University of Florida (Lindsay Campbell and Rob Guralnick).

Isadora Fluck joined the lab as a postdoctoral research associate after earning her PhD in Interdisciplinary Ecology at the University of Florida. Isadora brings extensive expertise in working with large ecological datasets and testing biodiversity hypotheses at macroecological scales. In October, she joined the 2026–2028 NEON Ambassador Cohort, which connects early-career researchers working to increase the value of the National Ecological Observatory Network. Her postdoctoral research investigates how ground beetle communities connect to plant, bird, and small mammal communities, and whether these relationships reveal broader biodiversity patterns not captured by climate alone. She will also leverage body-size data from thousands of ground beetle images to examine how body size varies within species across the country and whether these patterns are predictable.

Yi Liu joined the lab as a PhD student in Entomology after earning her M.S. in Geospatial Data Science at the University of Michigan. Yi brings an engineering background and strong quantitative skills to the lab. This fall, she is diving into entomology through Introduction to Entomology and Advanced Coleoptera Taxonomy. She has also begun research projects using weather radar to track insect biomass trends and NEON data to describe ground beetle phenology.

Tiger Wang joined the lab as an undergraduate researcher this fall. Tiger is a junior at UW–Madison with a long-standing interest in Lepidoptera taxonomy. He spent this past summer as an intern at the Frost Entomological Museum at Penn State, where he digitized and organized mostly Neotropical butterfly collections. This fall, he is taking Advanced Coleoptera Taxonomy and joining lab meetings, where he has been developing ideas for the lab’s group research project using computer vision to measure color and morphology from museum specimens.

Bick Lab

Dr. Emily Bick | Lab website

People, projects, and progress in precision pest ecology

It has been a busy year in the Bick Lab at UW–Madison! We are celebrating two successful master’s defenses, welcoming new team members, launching newly funded projects, and sharing five 2026 publications. Across these efforts, our team continues to develop open-source tools for sensing insects, forecasting pest risk, and supporting agricultural decision-making. We bring together expertise in entomology, engineering, computer science, robotics, and agricultural modeling.

Congratulations to Alex Arovas and Lauren Glynn, Bick Lab members who successfully defended their MS theses in Biological Systems Engineering! Alex Arovas lead our work on the Insect Eavesdropper, contributing to our work on sound-based insect monitoring. Lauren Glynn focused on large language models in Extension and cross-validation of insect sensors. We are proud of their accomplishments and grateful for their contributions to the lab.

Research staff, postdoctoral researchers, and fellows

• Garrett Laube joined us this summer as our new research technician. A recent graduate of UW–Madison’s entomology program, Garrett is leading our insect experimentation work.
• Daniel Garcia is a postdoctoral researcher jointly appointed in Entomology and Plant Pathology. His research focuses on expanding our sound-based sensing approaches beyond insect applications.
• Mia Phillips was selected for an ORISE Fellowship associated with an Insect Eavesdropper project on automating the phenotyping of insect resistance in plants. Working with Shawn Steffan’s USDA lab, she will maintain an honorary appointment with the Bick Lab. Dr. Phillips continues to bring her expertise in insect sounds to this collaborative work.

Graduate researchers

• Fletcher Robbins is in the final year of his PhD and is preparing for his preliminary examination on November 3. His dissertation is titled “An adaptive forecasting framework for spatially explicit pest risk in Wisconsin field crops.” Fletcher recently returned from Denmark, where an American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship supported his work with modeling professor Niels Holst at Aarhus University. While there, he was also competitively selected for and participated in the Insect AI Access 2026 program, which was funded through a competitive department grant.
• Louis “Lou” Breuilly began his PhD just over a year ago and is jointly supervised by Dr. Emily Bick and Dr. Brian Luck in Biological Systems Engineering. Lou is developing FlutterSense, a UAV-mounted entomological lidar system for precision pest management. A newly awarded Draper TIF grant will support the project’s next stage of development and field testing.

Insect identification, teaching, and technology development

• Colson Tidikis, Elias Glass, and Gale Hakopian support the lab’s insect identification work.
• Helena Eisert worked in the lab throughout the summer and has returned this fall as a teaching assistant for Dr. Bick’s “Principles in Economic Entomology” course. We are excited to see her build on her research experience through teaching.
• Brian Ouyang is taking over as lead developer for the Insect Eavesdropper. He leads our undergraduate computer science team, which includes Tony Zhen, Tommy Zheng, Kai Hammond, and Geet Gambhir. Geet is also contributing to a LoRa mesh-network project described in a manuscript currently under review at Sensors.
• Amber Verma joins us as our new robotics intern. She will work with Daniel to expand our sound-based sensor hardware beyond insect applications.

New funding: advancing sensors, breeding, and automated phenotyping

Four recently awarded grants are supporting the next phase of our collaborative research:

• Draper TIF: “Advancing FlutterSense to TRL 5: UAV-Mounted Entomological Lidar for Precision Pest Management in Cropping Systems.” This award supports continued development and field testing of FlutterSense, with Lou Breuilly helping lead the work.
• OREI: “Heterotic pool development in public sweet corn breeding programs.” The Bick Lab received funding as part of this collaborative sweet corn breeding project.
• USDA NACA: “Automating phenotyping of insect resistance for Lygus spp. in alfalfa.” This project advances our work on automated approaches to evaluating insect resistance in plants.
• SARE Mini-Grant: Funding a Soybean Gall Midge field day in Western Wisconsin.

Together, these awards expand our work across sensor development, crop improvement, and insect–plant interactions.

Our 2026 publications

This year’s publications span agricultural microclimate modeling, pest forecasting, audio visualization, regional survey design, and entomology education.

• Robbins, F., Olson, S., Kucharik, C., Arovas, A., and Bick, E. (2026). AgroEcoMetrics: A Python Toolkit for Modeling and Visualizing Agricultural Microclimates. Journal of Open Research Software, 14(1), Article 58.
• Robbins, F., Neven, L., and Bick, E. (2026). Generating degree day models using metabolic rates: comparing brown marmorated stink bug model predictions across the USA. Journal of Economic Entomology, toag258.
• Seow, K., Arovas, A., Steinmetz, G., and Bick, E. (2026). BickGraphing: Web-Based Application for Visual Inspection of Audio Recordings. Journal of Open Research Software, 14(1), Article 56.
• Robbins, F., Hamilton, K., Schilder, T., Bradford, B., and Bick, E. (2026). Enhancing regional pest surveys: evaluating and guiding site selection with new methodology. Journal of Economic Entomology, 119(3), 1992–1998.
• Robbins, F., Oker, H., Guédot, C., and Bick, E. (2026). Exploring pest population dynamics using the economic entomology modeling activity. Natural Sciences Education, 55(1), e70051.

Looking ahead

This fall, we are preparing for Fletcher’s preliminary examination, increasing Insect Eavesdropper accessibility to labs past our collaborators, moving FlutterSense toward field testing, and continuing internal develop of the Insect Eavesdropper data pipelines and its applications. Thank you to our students, staff, collaborators, and funding partners for supporting this work—and for helping us connect new technologies with practical agricultural questions.

Brown Lab

Dr. James Brown

Hello everyone! My name is Dr. James Brown, and on July 6th, I became the new Fruit Crop Entomologist. I am thrilled to be here and grateful for the warm welcome I’ve received from everyone I’ve met so far.

For those I haven’t connected with yet, let me share a bit about my path here. I started in entomology at the USDA in Florida, working in a biological control lab that focused on insect predators and parasitoids to manage the fall armyworm. That led to a master’s degree investigating the overwintering physiology of the European corn borer, then a PhD with Dr. Oscar Liburd focused on applied integrated pest management (IPM) of Drosophila suzukii (spotted-wing drosophila) in blueberries.

Here at UW-Madison, I look forward to building a program at the intersection of fundamental IPM strategies, chemical ecology, and behavioral ecology to optimize pest management for growers. I am also excited to help train the next generation of agricultural entomologists! Over the past few months, I’ve met with Wisconsin apple, grape, berry, and cranberry associations, listening to their concerns and thinking of collaborative ways to solve their insect challenges.

Guided by those conversations, the Brown Lab is already ramping up for an exciting research season. We are actively recruiting undergraduate researchers and preparing to welcome our first graduate student, and we have some pretty cool research planned for the upcoming year. It has only been a few months, and the future is looking bright!

Crall Lab

Dr. James Crall | Lab website

We’re excited to welcome new members to the lab this fall! Aaron Jackson joined the lab as a PhD student in the first cohort of UW-Madison’s new Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) PhD program, where he was selected for a competitive program fellowship. Aaron will combine agent-based models with experiments to study how individual behavioral variation shapes colony performance and resilience in bumble bees. He arrives fresh off a big summer: in August he presented his undergraduate thesis research, Modeling the Effect of Artificial Feeders on Hummingbird Territory Distributions and Pollination, at the Mathematical Association of America’s MathFest conference in Boston, where he won an Outstanding Poster Award. Congrats Aaron!

We also have several undergraduate researchers joining or returning to the lab this semester, including Omar Abukar (working Anupreksha Jain on desiccation impacts on bees), Aishika Samanta (working with Nicole DesJardins and James on pesticide impacts on social learning), Reuven Weinstein (working with August Easton-Calabria on deep learning for bee behavioral tracking), and Mingxiu Liu (working with Dr. Ari Grele on plant stress and management practices on floral traits). We also said goodbye to Jamie Resis, an undergraduate researcher who worked with Gigi Melone for several years, and graduated in spring.

We’re also thrilled to welcome back Dr. Olivia Bernauer, a former postdoc in the lab, who has returned to Madison as a Staff Scientist. Olivia will lead our Wisconsin DATCP-funded work on temperature and pollination effectiveness in cranberry. Olivia and her husband Zach also just welcomed their daughter, Violet Ava Smith, in September. Congrats Olivia and Zach, and welcome to the world, Violet!

We also send a fond farewell and big congratulations to Dr. Nicole DesJardins, who has started a new position as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Mary Gardiner’s lab at the Ohio State University in the Department of Entomology.

In June, Anupreksha Jain and Nicole presented their work at the International Conference on Pollinator Biology, Health, and Policy in Bozeman, MT. August Easton-Calabria gave an invited symposium presentation at the annual Animal Behavior Society meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio. In July, Gigi Melone presented her work at the annual Ecological Society of America meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah.

New publications

• Bernauer OM, Smith MAY, Salas R, Wartell T, Tang ATS, Groves RL, Spiesman BJ, Gratton C, Crall JD (2026). Automated flower monitoring with deep learning reveals fine-scale microclimate selection by pollinators. Current Biology 36(13): 3425–3433. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2026.06.002
• Crall JD, Gaiarsa MP (2026). From individuals to networks: The role of variation in plant–pollinator communities’ responses to global change. Journal of Animal Ecology 95: 1586–1597. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.70300
• Salerno V, Tang ATS, Mora J, Argueta-Guzmán M, González B, Peterson SS, McFrederick QS, Gaiarsa MP, Crall J (2026). osmiaCAM: A low-cost imaging monitoring system for linking solitary bee foraging, nest provisioning, and environmental sensitivity. Integrative and Comparative Biology 66: icag081. https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icag081 oup
• Hunt R, Easton-Calabria A, Crall J (2026). BeeWhere: Segmenting bumble bee colonies to quantify behavioral effects. Accepted to ECCV 2026 Computer Vision for Ecology Workshop Proceedings. arXiv:2610.03051 arxiv

Gratton Lab

Dr. Claudio Gratton | Lab website

Jade Kochanski will be defending her PhD dissertation in Integrative Biology this fall (Wed, Oct 28, 9-10am) as part of the departmental seminar series. Jade’s dissertation research focuses on bridging basic and applied science to understand whether prairie restoration is an effective method for long-term conservation of bumble bees and how managing prairie with prescribed fire affects bumble bees. Jade has been a member of the department for many years, earning her BS in Entomology and Environmental Studies in 2016 and MS in Entomology in 2020.

Groves Lab

Guédot Lab

Oliva Chavez Lab

Paskewitz Lab

Schoville Lab

Young Lab

Bugs in the news

• The World’s First Bugs Had Way More Legs. Ancient fossils suggest insects conquered land through a long amphibious phase rather than making an abrupt jump from water to dry ground. A newly identified 324-million-year-old species still carried paddle-like abdominal limbs, revealing an evolutionary bridge between aquatic ancestors and modern six-legged insects. – NYTimes and ScienceDaily
• These Teeny Tiny Spiders Are Social Media Stars. Jumping spiders are tiny, social, hairy creatures. In a sea of sameness online, they are growing in popularity. Even spider-haters are charmed. – NYTimes
• An Invasive Mosquito Is Spreading With Alarming Speed, Threatening Africa’s Cities. The malaria-carrying mosquito Anopheles stephensi is resistant to all insecticides. Scientists are scrambling to find ways to blunt the risk. – NYTimes
• The U.S. Eradicated this flesh-eating parasite. Now it’s back. The flesh eating New World screwworm has returned to the United States, threatening livestock, wildlife, pets and potentially people as it spreads north. A new UC San Diego tracking system aims to predict where the parasite could strike next while officials revive the eradication strategy that defeated it decades ago. – ScienceDaily
• Queen bees have a disturbing way to survive pesticides. Honeybee queens exposed to pesticides can shift some of the contamination into their eggs, revealing a previously unknown survival strategy. The process may protect the queen while putting developing offspring, and potentially the entire colony, at risk. – ScienceDaily
• World’s most-used weedkiller disrupts honeybee brains. Glyphosate was long thought to be safe for honeybees because they lack the enzyme the chemical targets in weeds. However, researchers found that exposed bees foraged 13 percent less after only three days and showed changes in brain chemicals linked to behavior. Across a whole hive, that decline could reduce honey production, weaken pollination, and threaten long-term survival. – ScienceDaily
• This giant stick insect fooled scientists for decades. Scientists have identified two new species of large Australian stick insects, including one that lays extraordinary “lidded” eggs never before recorded in the group. The discovery also revealed that a familiar stick insect had been misidentified for decades, showing how much biodiversity may still be hiding in plain sight. – ScienceDaily
• New chemical wipes out 95% of termites without harming humans. A chemical that stops drywood termites from building new exoskeletons killed about 95% of colonies in testing, offering a potentially safer alternative to traditional fumigation. Because termites eventually have no choice but to molt, the treatment turns a normal stage of their life cycle into a fatal weakness. – ScienceDaily
• Your dislike of eating bugs may be 9,000 years old. Ancient teeth and human DNA are revealing a surprising history of insect eating. Modern humans in northern Eurasia appear to have eaten insects only occasionally, while Neanderthals may have consumed them much more regularly. Populations near the tropics also retained genes that make insect exoskeletons easier to digest. – ScienceDaily
• Pollen has a surprising problem — and honeybees have found a way around it. Honeybees can apparently detect when their food has the wrong balance of essential nutrients and adjust how much they eat to avoid potentially harmful excesses. They also transform pollen into remarkably well-balanced baby food for their larvae, revealing a sophisticated nutritional strategy hidden inside the hive. – ScienceDaily
• A 60-year-old theory about ants, bees and wasps may be wrong. Scientists have long thought an unusual genetic system helped ants, bees, and wasps evolve their extraordinary social colonies. A massive new analysis suggests that genetics alone can’t explain it—and the real secret may lie in other traits unique to these insects. – ScienceDaily
• These insect submariners survive depths that should crush them. Lake fly larvae plunge more than 200 meters into Lake Malawi each day to hide from predators, using tiny air sacs to control their depth. A rubber-like material called resilin lets them expand or shrink the sacs by changing their pH. Their toughness challenges a popular explanation for why insects are absent from the open ocean. – ScienceDaily
• Scientists discover the hidden brain switch that assigns bees their jobs. Researchers found that specific brain circuits help decide which jobs bees perform as they age. When those circuits were switched off, older worker bees began caring for the queen again instead of carrying out their normal later-life duties. The findings reveal that a bee colony’s complex division of labor may be guided by neural switches hidden inside each bee’s brain. – ScienceDaily
• Ant brains reveal how evolution turned hunger into parenting. Ant parenting may have evolved from the same brain systems that once controlled hunger. Researchers found that two chemical signals push clonal raider ants toward either caring for larvae or leaving to forage, with the balance changing as the ants grow older. Similar signals are involved in mammalian caregiving, suggesting that evolution may have followed the same basic blueprint across very different animals. – ScienceDaily
• These bizarre new beetles look so stretchy scientists named them Luffy. Scientists have named a newly discovered beetle genus Luffy, inspired by the stretchy hero of the manga and anime One Piece. The insects have unusually long, slender mandibles, antennae, and mouthparts that resemble Luffy’s rubber-like ability to extend his body. – ScienceDaily
• Bumblebees collect up to 7 times more toxic metals than honeybees. Bumblebees are picking up dramatically more toxic heavy metals than honeybees, even when both species forage in the same places. Researchers warn that this hidden pollution could quietly reduce their ability to find food, reproduce, and keep colonies healthy. – ScienceDaily
• This common pesticide may be quietly wiping out future bumblebees. A next-generation pesticide designed to kill crop pests may also be interfering with the reproductive health of bumblebees. Researchers discovered that low-dose exposure to sulfoxaflor changed gene activity, especially in tissues involved in reproduction, raising concerns about long-term impacts on bee populations. Because pollinators are essential for about one-third of the world’s food production, finding ways to protect them while controlling pests has become increasingly important. – ScienceDaily
• This newly discovered ballista spider catapults ants into a deadly trap. Scientists have discovered a “ballista spider” that builds a spring-powered silk trap designed specifically to catch aggressive green tree ants. The ant unknowingly triggers the mechanism itself, launching into the spider’s web in one of nature’s most extraordinary hunting strategies. – ScienceDaily
• Scientists mapped every neural connection in a fruit fly and found a surprise. A groundbreaking new connectome maps every neural connection in an adult fruit fly’s central nervous system, creating an unprecedented view of how the brain and body work together. The findings suggest that complex behaviors emerge from distributed local circuits rather than a single central controller, offering new clues about intelligence, movement, and brain function. – ScienceDaily
• Scientists stunned as bumble bees solve a classic intelligence test. Bumble bees astonished researchers by inventing a new way to reach a hidden reward by standing on a ball, despite never being taught the trick. The discovery adds to growing evidence that these tiny insects are far smarter and more adaptable than once believed. – ScienceDaily
• This blood-feeding fly sacrifices its sight after finding a host. Deer keds rely on flight and vision to find a host, but everything changes once they land. After shedding their wings forever, these parasites reduce the activity of key vision-related genes by about half. Scientists believe they are effectively trading sharp eyesight for extra energy that can be used for feeding and reproduction. – ScienceDaily
• Oak trees are delaying spring to starve caterpillars. Oak trees have a surprising trick to fight back against hungry caterpillars: they simply wait. When trees are heavily attacked one year, they delay leaf growth by just three days the next spring—long enough to leave newly hatched caterpillars with nothing to eat. This small shift slashes insect survival and reduces leaf damage by more than half, proving even more efficient than costly chemical defenses. – ScienceDaily
• Scientists stunned as pink katydid transforms into green camouflage. A bizarre rainforest insect is rewriting what scientists thought they knew about camouflage. A katydid spotted glowing hot pink in Panama stunned researchers when it slowly transformed into green in just 11 days, perfectly mirroring the life cycle of tropical leaves that emerge pink before maturing. What once seemed like a rare genetic oddity now appears to be a clever survival trick, allowing the insect to blend in as its leafy surroundings change. – ScienceDaily

These “plastivore” caterpillars can devour a plastic bag in just 24 hours. Scientists have discovered that waxworm caterpillars can break down polyethylene plastic, one of the most common and persistent pollutants on Earth. But there’s a twist: on a plastic-only diet, the caterpillars weaken and die quickly. Scientists are now experimenting with ways to keep them alive longer.- ScienceDaily

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