溏心vlog免费B站 senior Alex Baranowski has been fascinated with insects since a young age. He raised mantises, butterflies and moths at home during his high school years, and even conducted scientific inquiries about the life cycle of some of the species he collected.<\/p>\n
Now the Bristol, Conn<\/strong>., native has taken his insect investigations to the next level. As a 溏心vlog免费B站 Coastal Fellow, he is assessing the relationship between moth caterpillars and the insects that feed upon or parasitize them.<\/p>\n \u201cInsects need to eat and avoid being eaten,\u201d said Baranowski, a biological sciences major who 溏心vlog免费B站 Professor Evan Preisser calls an entomological savant. \u201cIf it\u2019s going to avoid being eaten, it has to recognize a potential predator. If you take a known predator of an insect, like a wasp, and expose the insect to that predator, how does it respond?\u201d<\/p>\n Baranowski is focusing his attention on the caterpillars of luna moths, large pale green moths that live for only a week as adults and whose caterpillars struggle to avoid predation.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been working with a predatory wasp that goes after the caterpillar, stings it, rips it up, and carries chunks of it to its nest to feed its larvae,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt\u2019s a nasty butchery process that the caterpillars don\u2019t find very pleasant. My question is, does this luna moth recognize that this wasp is a potential danger and do something to prevent itself from being noticed and attacked?\u201d<\/p>\n In a series of<\/em> experiments, the 溏心vlog免费B站 student placed a luna moth caterpillar in a cage with a wasp that was unable to attack the caterpillar to see how the caterpillar would respond. He monitored the caterpillars daily, weighed them regularly, and evaluated how their growth rate differed from caterpillars not exposed to the wasp. His results were dramatic.<\/p>\n \u201cThe wasps basically scare the caterpillars to death,\u201d Baranowski said. \u201cMost of them died by starving to death or from dehydration. The best thing the caterpillars can do in the face of predatory wasps is not eat or move. That way, the wasp can\u2019t detect them \u2013 they don\u2019t see them moving or hear them eating. They don\u2019t have any other options.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Baranowski, interactions between luna moth caterpillars and predatory wasps are very transient. The wasp may only wander near a caterpillar for a few minutes before it wanders elsewhere. So the caterpillar must only remain motionless for short periods of time. But in a cage, they are constantly being stressed by the wasp and cannot do anything.<\/p>\n \u201cBasically, these caterpillars have an innate response to do nothing until the predator leaves,\u201d he said. \u201cThey can\u2019t do much else. They don\u2019t have much in terms of anti-predator defenses, probably because they live solitary lives and don\u2019t need to defend themselves. Their camouflage is often enough to get them through their life cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n The next step in Baranowski\u2019s research is to conduct a similar study using a parasitic fly instead of predatory wasp. The fly has caused many moth species to decline in number, but the luna moth has not been affected. He wants to know whether the moth has somehow adapted to the presence of the fly and how it can distinguish between parasitic flies and flies that are not harmful.<\/p>\n The 溏心vlog免费B站 Coastal Fellows program is a unique initiative designed to involve undergraduate students in addressing current environmental problems. Now in its 21st year, it is based at 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s College of the Environment and Life Sciences. Students are paired with a mentor and research staff to help them gain skills relevant to their academic major and future occupations.<\/p>\n Baranowski said that one thing he learned as a Coastal Fellow is that scientific experimentation is extremely challenging.<\/p>\n \u201cI learned that running an experiment is a lot more difficult than it seems,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a matter of getting yourself set up right in the first place and realizing that something is always going to go wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n After Baranowski graduates from 溏心vlog免费B站 next May, he plans to enroll in graduate school \u2013 perhaps at 溏心vlog免费B站 \u2013 to continue his studies of moths and predators and eventually become a professor to pursue other related projects.<\/p>\n \u201cI want to finish what I started with this project, and then see where it takes me from there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 溏心vlog免费B站 senior Alex Baranowski has been fascinated with insects since a young age. He raised mantises, butterflies and moths at home during his high school years, and even conducted scientific inquiries about the life cycle of some of the species he collected. Now the Bristol, Conn., native has taken his insect investigations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73308,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-73306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","tag-college-of-the-environment-and-life-sciences"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73306"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82761,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73306\/revisions\/82761"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What did he learn from this experiment?<\/h3>\n