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A house mouse sitting in a yard in Australia Passing Traveller/Shutterstock
House mice may look cute, but they’re little monsters when it comes to crops. The rodents destroy 70 million tons of rice, wheat, and maize each year by devouring and infesting stored grain. They also dig up and eat the seeds farmers have planted.
Humans have been locked in a battle with these pests for millennia, using everything from cats to poisons. A new study may have found a better—and more humane—alternative: camouflaging fields with a scent that makes the seeds practically undetectable to mice.
It’s a “simple but elegant” solution, says Nils Christian Stenseth, a biologist at the University of Oslo and an expert of rodent impacts on crops who was not involved with the work. The approach, he says, could be applied to other crop pests such as insects and rats.
Mice rely on their sense of smell to find food. When it comes to wheat, that means sniffing out wheat germ, the embryo inside the seed that develops into the plant. House mice (Mus musculus) are an especially big problem in Australia, because they are not native. During years when their populations explode, the rodents can cause significant losses to the country’s $13 billion wheat harvest.
Farmers in Australia have mainly tried to control the mice with poisons and pesticides, says Peter Banks, a biologist at the University of Sydney. But these chemicals have to be reapplied often, which gets expensive. They can also kill birds and other wildlife.
Hay destroyed by mice when a mouse plague hit Australia in 2021Jill Gralow/Reuters
In the new study, Banks and his colleagues modified a strategy that has proved successful in protecting endangered birds in New Zealand: throwing nonnative predators off the scent of their prey by robbing the scent of its meaning. In the New Zealand study, scientists smeared birds’ scents in places birds would never be found, such as piles of rocks. After a few days, cats and other predators began to view these scents as “misinformation.” When the native ground-nesting shorebirds arrived for their nesting season, the predators didn’t bother pursuing them even though they could smell them.
To try something similar for mice, Banks and his colleagues divided a wheat farm in rural New South Wales in Australia into 60 plots of 10 by 10 meters where wheat would be sown. The team sprayed unsown plots with wheat germ oil, hoping local mice would learn to associate wheat fields with a waste of their time and energy. In other fields, the team sprayed the soil with wheat germ oil after sowing, whereas other plots were left untreated.
Unlike in the New Zealand study, attempts to get the mice to see the wheat germ scent as a false signal largely didn’t work. Instead, “camouflaging” wheat fields with the scent did; in fields where the scent was overwhelming, the mice couldn’t seem to figure out where the seeds were. The camouflaged plots suffered 74% less damage than the untreated plot, the team reports today in Nature Sustainability.
The equipment needed to spray the wheat germ scent on soil is part of common farm machinery, Banks notes, and wheat germ oil is an inexpensive byproduct of wheat milling. So the approach should be relatively easy to adopt by farmers, he says.
“This is a really nice piece of work,” says Peter Brown, a biologist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, an Australian government agency that funds and performs scientific research. Still, he says, the researchers need to figure out how much wheat germ oil farmers would need to apply—and how often—before the work can be translated to the real world. “Should it be applied every year, or just when mouse numbers are high at sowing? Lots of questions remain.”
The technology developed by researchers at the University of Sydney could revolutionize agricultural loss management due to mouse plague.
In 2021, NSW Farmers predicted that the mouse plague would inflict $1 billion in crop loss in Australia.
The study, published in Nature Sustainability, was led by Ph.D. student Finn Parker, with co-authors from the Sydney Institute of Agriculture and School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Professor Peter Banks, Dr. Catherine Price, and Jenna Bytheway.
According to the research team, spraying diluted wheat germ oil on a wheat crop before and after seeding reduces mice’s ability to successfully steal wheat seeds by 63 percent compared to untreated controls.
Seed loss was decreased by 74 percent if the same solution was applied to the wheat plot before planting. They claim that the mice have figured out how to ignore the wheat odour by the time the crop is sown.
This disinformation strategy may be effective in other agricultural systems since any animal that uses smell to locate food is potentially subject to our capacity to manipulate that smell and impair the animal’s ability to search.
Professor Banks said, “We could reduce mice damage even during plague conditions simply by making it hard for mice to find their food, by camouflaging the seed odor. Because they’re hungry, they can’t spend all their time searching for food that’s hard to find.”
He also said, “When the smell of the seed is everywhere, they’ll just go and look for something else instead of being encouraged to dig. That’s because mice are precise foragers that can smell seeds in the ground and explore exactly where a seed is. However, they can’t do that because everything smells like seeds. This misinformation tactic could work well in other crop systems. Indeed, any animal that finds food by smell is potentially vulnerable to us manipulating that smell and undermining their ability to search.”
Finn Parker said, “The camouflage appeared to last until after the seeds germinated, which is the period of vulnerability when wheat needs to be protected.”
He added that camouflage treatment could be an effective solution for wheat growers, given wheat’s brief vulnerability.
He said, “Most mouse damage occurs when seeds are sown up to germination, just under two weeks later. Mice can’t evolve resistance to the method either because it uses the same odor that mice rely on to find wheat seeds.”
The majority of mouse damage happens between the time seeds are sown and germination or slightly under two weeks later.
In May 2021, 60 plots on a farm 10 kilometers northwest of Pleasant Hills, New South Wales, served as the testing ground for five treatments.
The other three treatments were controls, while two used the wheat germ oil solution.
Similar results were achieved by all control treatments, which sustained noticeably more significant damage than treated plots.
A reasonably affordable by-product of milling is wheat germ oil. The scientists claimed that their solution, consisting of diluted wheat germ oil in water, provides a safe, long-lasting substitute for pesticides and baits.
“If people want to control mice but can’t get numbers down low enough, our technique can be a potent alternative to pesticides or add value to existing methods.” Dr Price said.
The research could aid wheat farmers at a crucial time.
The number of mice is increasing, and wheat is sown in the middle of fall.
According to the Department of Agriculture, the Australian wheat market is anticipated to hit a record high of $15 billion this fiscal year.
Wheat producers may benefit from the research at this critical time. Wheat is sown in the middle of fall, and mouse populations are increasing.
The next step is for the researchers to determine how diluted the concentration can be and still effectively repel mice and how frequently the solution needs to be sprayed on a crop to maintain its efficacy.
According to the Department of Agriculture, the Australian wheat market is anticipated to hit a record high of $15 billion this fiscal year.
Several hundred farmers in the rural areas of Kalimpong district of West Bengal need to protect their crops from peacocks. In several parts of Kalimpong, where rice, chilies, vegetables, millet, flowers and fruits grow in abundance, peacocks – the national bird – have come to be a headache for most farmers, many of whom have incurred losses and shifted to crops like maize that do not attract the birds as much.
Others have taken to building temporary huts in the fields where they spend the night to protect the crops from peacocks and peahens who usually come to the farms in the early hours of the morning.
The growers cannot harm these birds, as they are protected by law.
Researchers at the University of Adelaide have released their findings about the potential effectiveness of gene drive technology to control invasive mice.
Key points:
A South Australian research team identifies new technology it hopes will eventually curb mice numbers
Co-author Luke Gierus says the technology is the first feasible genetic biocontrol tool for invasive mammals
Researchers believe the technology can be developed to work against other invasive pests
The technology — named t-CRISPR — uses sophisticated computer modelling on laboratory mice.
DNA technology is used to make alterations to a female fertility gene and, once the population is saturated with the genetic modification, the females that are generated will be infertile.
Research paper co-first author and post-graduate student Luke Gierus said the technology was the first genetic biological control tool for invasive animals.
“So we can do an initial seeding of a couple hundred mice and that will be enough, in theory, to spread and eradicate an entire population,” he said.
“We’ve done some modelling in this paper and we’ve shown using this system we can release 256 mice into a population of 200,000 on an island and that would eradicate those 200,000 in about 25 years.”
Paper co-author Luke Gierus says the technology has a long way to go but signs are promising.(Supplied: Luke Gierus)
The team has been undertaking the research for five years.
Mr Gierus said the next step would be to continue testing in laboratories before releasing mice onto islands where the team could safely monitor the effects.
He said the method was far more humane than other methods, such as baiting.
“It’s potentially a new tool that can either be used alongside the current technology or by itself,” Mr Gierus said.
“This is quite a revolutionary technology that gives us another way to try and control and suppress mice.”
Invasive mouse species have caused millions of dollars in damages to crops in recent years.(ABC News Video)
Technology welcomed
CSIRO research officer and mouse expert Steve Henry said wiping out mice from agricultural systems would be a wonderful outcome but he could not see it happening any time soon.
“The farming community are fantastic in terms of their willingness to adopt new ideas, so while it’s really important to do this research, the time frame is long and we need to make sure we don’t say we have a solution that’s just around the corner.”
But Mr Henry believed the technology would be welcomed with open arms when it did arrive.
CSIRO researcher Steve Henry says farmers are keen on innovative solutions.(ABC News: Alice Kenney)
“While we need to be focusing on the stuff that we can use to control mice now, we also need to be looking outside of the box in terms of these new technologies … into the future,” he said.
Mr Henry said that while he did not have extensive knowledge about the technology, it was exciting.
“The other thing that is really cool is you can make it so it doesn’t affect native rodent species as well,” he said.
Farmers group welcomes research
Grain Producers South Australia chief executive officer Brad Perry said introduced mouse species could severely damage crops and equipment, and recent plagues had been destructive.
“When it comes to pests and diseases in grain and agriculture more broadly, we need to be innovative and think outside the square on prevention measures,” Mr Perry said.
He said technology such as this could help farmers save money in the long run.
Invasive mice species can have a devastating impact on crops.(Supplied: Michael Vincent)
“Grain producers currently manage populations by minimising the food source at harvest, and if populations require [it] zinc phosphide baits are used,” Mr Perry said.
“However, using baits adds to input costs, it is not always readily available and there are limited windows to when this is effective.”
Mr Perry said many farmers would be keen to see the technology in the near future.
“We are supportive of additional tools that help reduce introduced mouse populations — particularly when it involves local world-leading research at the University of Adelaide — which is targeted, reduces inputs and is sustainable.”
Bats help keep forests growing. Without bats to hold their populations in check, insects that munch on tree seedlings go wild, doing three to nine times more damage than when bats are on the scene. That’s according to a new study from the University of Illinois. The article, “Bats reduce insect density and defoliation in temperate forests: an exclusion experiment,” is published inEcology.
“A lot of folks associate bats with caves. But as it turns out, the habitat you could really associate with almost every bat species in North America is forest. And this is true globally. Forests are just really important to bats,” says Joy O’Keefe, study co-author and assistant professor and wildlife extension specialist in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at Illinois. “We wanted to ask the question: Are bats important to forests? And in this study, we’ve demonstrated they are.”
Other researchers have demonstrated bats’ insect-control services in crop fields and tropical forest systems, but no one has shown their benefits in temperate forests until now.
“It’s especially important for us to learn how bats affect forests, given that bats are declining due to diseases like white-nose syndrome or collisions with wind turbines. This type of work can reveal the long-term consequences of bat declines,” says Elizabeth Beilke, postdoctoral researcher and lead author on the study.
The research team built giant mesh-enclosed structures in an Indiana forest to exclude the eight bat species that frequent the area, including two federally threatened or endangered species. The mesh openings were large enough to allow insects free movement in and out, but not flying bats. Every morning and evening for three summers, Beilke opened and closed the mesh sides and tops of the structures to ensure birds had daytime access to the plots. That way, she could be sure she was isolating the impacts of bats.
Beilke then measured the number of insects on oak and hickory seedlings in the forest understory, as well as the amount of defoliation per seedling. Because she erected an equal number of box frames without mesh, Beilke was able to compare insect density and defoliation with and without bats.
Overall, the researchers found three times as many insects and five times more defoliation on the seedlings when bats were excluded than in control plots that allowed bats in each night. When analyzed separately, oaks experienced nine times more defoliation and hickories three times more without bats.
“We know from other research that oaks and hickories are ecologically important, with acorns and hickory nuts providing food sources for wildlife and the trees acting as hosts to native insects. Bats use both oaks and hickories as roosts, and now we see they may be using them as sources of prey insects, as well. Our data suggest bats and oaks have a mutually beneficial relationship,” Beilke says.
While insect pressure was intense in plots without bat predation, the seedlings didn’t succumb to their injuries. But the researchers say long-term bat declines could prove fatal for the baby trees.
“We were observing sublethal levels of defoliation, but we know defoliation makes seedlings more vulnerable to death from other factors such as drought or fungal diseases. It would be hard to track the fate of these trees over 90 years, but I think a natural next step is to examine the impact of persistent low levels of defoliation on these seedlings,” Beilke says. “To what extent does repeated defoliation reduce their competitive ability and contribute to oak declines?”
The researchers point out that birds, many of which share the same insect diets as bats, are also declining. While they specifically sought to isolate bats’ impact on forest trees, the researchers are confident insect density and defoliation rates would have been higher if they had excluded both birds and bats in their study. In fact, similar exclusion studies focusing on birds failed to account for bats in their study designs, leaving mesh enclosures up all night.
“When we were initially working on the proposal for this research, we looked at 37 different bird exclusion studies, across agriculture and forest systems. We found nearly all of them had made this mistake. Most of them had not opened or removed their treatment plots to bats,” Beilke says.
In other words, before Beilke’s study, birds were getting at least partial credit for work bats were doing in the shadows.
Clearly, both types of winged predators are important for forest health in temperate systems. And, according to O’Keefe, that makes these studies even more critical to inform forest management.
“I think it’s important to stress the value of this type of experimental work with bats, to really try to dig into what their ecosystem services are in a deliberate manner. While we can probably extrapolate out and say bats are important in other types of forest, I wouldn’t discount the value of doing the same kind of work in other systems, especially if there are questions about certain insect or tree species and how bats affect them. So rather than extrapolating out across the board, let’s do the work to try to figure out how bats are benefiting plants,” she says. “And before they’re gone, hopefully.”
More information: Elizabeth A. Beilke et al, Bats reduce insect density and defoliation in temperate forests: An exclusion experiment, Ecology (2022). DOI: 10.1002/ecy.3903
Imagine a world where farms bear no crops, forests have no trees and nature exists without plants.
Not only will our world look incredibly different, but humanity would likely cease to exist altogether. Plants provide 98% of the air we breathe and 80% of the food we eat. That’s how much our lives depend on plants, yet we often overlook how vital they are.
Our global plant resources are under threat from pests and diseases. Once plant pests are established in an area, it becomes nearly impossible and extremely costly to eradicate them. This sets back global efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by curtailing our ability to provide food security for all, protect our environment and biodiversity for future generations, and to ensure that crops and plant products are traded safely to help boost economic growth.
Every year, we lose as much as 40% of global crop yields or around US$220 billion due to plant pests. In Africa alone, nearly US$10 billion worth of annual maize yield is lost due to fall armyworm, a dangerous transboundary pest that has now spread in more than 70 countries. Reducing this menace will help alleviate hunger of the type faced by some 828 million people around the world in 2021, according to the latest report of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Climate change has increased pest incursions, particularly in new places where they had not been detected previously but have now thrived. Changing temperatures, humidity, light and wind are the second most important factors for pests to disperse, next to international travel and trade.
Invasive pests remain the main drivers of biodiversity loss. As the world becomes more globalized and interconnected, the increase in the movement of people and goods has been associated with the rise of the introduction and spread of plant pests across borders.
That is why global frameworks are crucial such as the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC), an international treaty ratified by 184 countries which makes provisions for the protection and safeguarding of plants and facilitation of safe trade.
International Standards for Phytosanitary Measures—the gold standard in plant health—are in place for countries to adopt in their national legislation and import requirements. These standards range from pest surveillance, pest risk analysis, guidance for countries in developing pest eradication programs, national reporting of important pests, and more.
Global network of plant experts
Building a global community of plant health experts and advocates is essential. The IPPC Secretariat works with partners and donors to develop standards, facilitate countries’ adoption of the Convention and implementation of standards, and build the capacity of national plant protection organizations.
Guides, training materials and e-learning courses help these plant stewards effectively carry out their duties in safeguarding plants. Innovative tools such as the ePhyto allow countries to trade safely using digital phytosanitary certificates that make the trade in plants safer, faster and cheaper.
Raising global awareness and action among the wider public is also important. In 2020, we celebrated the International Year of Plant Health through 680 events held in 86 countries.
On May 12, 2022, the first International Day of Plant Health was declared following its adoption at the General Assembly of the United Nations in March. We thank the governments of Zambia and Finland as tireless champions in tabling the resolution at the Assembly, supported by FAO and the IPPC Secretariat.
The IPPC Secretariat and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs of the UK this week partnered to gather the world’s best plant health experts and advocates. The first and largest International Plant Health Conference being held in London aims to address new and emerging challenges such as climate change impact, the increase in international trade, the rapid loss of biodiversity and new pest pathways such as e-commerce. We will explore more efficient policies, structures and mechanisms at the national, regional and global levels.
Much work remains in protecting our plants. We need to be cautious when bringing plants and plant products when traveling as these could carry plant pests and diseases. Likewise, we should be aware that buying plants and plant products online should come with phytosanitary certificates that attest they meet phytosanitary import requirements.
E-commerce is an emerging pathway for the introduction and spread of plant pests. Online purchases cross international borders through mail or express freight systems via air freight or sea containers. These purchases often include but are not limited to, ornamental plants, soil from imported plants, untreated wood packaging materials such as pallets and crates and even novelty items such as seed-infused “plantable bookmarks.”
We call on governments, legislators, policymakers and donors to invest in research, outreach and in building the capacity of national plant protection organizations, and to strengthen pest monitoring and early warning systems.
We need all industry actors and government partners to adhere to international plant health standards to mutually protect our plants, food supplies and our economies.
When we protect plants, we protect our health, our environment, our livelihoods and our lives.
A greater mouse-eared bat (Myotis myotis) in flight. This species can imitate a hornet’s buzz to ward off predators.PHOTOGRAPH BY WILDLIFE GMBH / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
These bats imitate hornets to avoid being eaten by owls
Mouse-eared bats make sounds like buzzing hornets, in an apparent attempt to avoid avian predation—a remarkable adaptation not previously seen in a mammal
BYSOFIA QUAGLIA
PUBLISHED MAY 9, 2022
• 7 MIN READ
Mimicry is widespread in the animal kingdom.
Some caterpillars can make themselves look like venomous snakes. The chicks of an Amazonian bird called the cinereous mourner shapeshift into poisonous larvae. Flower-loving hoverflies evolved to look just like stinging, unpalatable wasps.
These are all examples ofBatesian mimicry, an evolutionary trick which leads a relatively harmless animal to copy a more dangerous species to scare off would-be predators.
But this specific type of mimicry is almost always visual in nature, so far as we know. And it’s most commonly found in insects, birds, and reptiles.
Now, for the first time, a type of acoustic mimicry has been observed in mammals. A study published May 9 in Current Biology found that a common European species, the greater mouse-eared bats, seems to imitate the buzzing sound of hornets—presumably to avoid being eaten by owls.
“We discovered that a mammal mimics the sound of an insect to scare a predatory bird,” saysDanilo Russo, the lead author of the paper and an ecology professor at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, in Italy. “This is an amazing evolutionary interaction involving three species that are evolutionarily distant from one another.”
What’s the buzz?
Greater mouse-eared bats, also known as Myotis myotis, are a widespread European bat species that likes to munch on insects, especially beetles. They hang out in colonies in the woodlands and forest edges, roosting in caves underground for most of the year, or in buildings during the summer. They are often preyed upon by various birds, including barn owls (Tyto alba) and tawny owls (Strix aluco), especially when leaving or returning to their roosts.
Back in 1999, Russo was working to set up a call library for echolocation calls of European bats and collecting data about how various species communicate amongst themselves. While extracting a small mouse-eared bat from a mist-net, holding it in his hands, the creature started shivering and emitting a continuous, intense buzz, Russo says. Russo was surprised.
“My very first thought was… it sounds like hornets, or wasps!”
Initially, the researchers speculated that the buzzing was just an everyday distress call. But the sound was so obviously similar to an insect that a hypothesis originated almost immediately, Russo says, and, finally, years later, they decided to test it: Could it be that the bats were imitating hornets or bees?
Russo himself had collected pellets of barn owls in the past, at the entrance to a cave where these bats roost. “Believe it or not, the pellets contained a lot of bat skulls,” he says, so he felt it was not impossible these bats “may have, evolutionarily speaking, ‘made’ a very extreme attempt to deter [owls] to escape.”
Giving a hoot
In the current study, Russo and colleagues first compared the bat’s buzzing sounds with those of four different species of hymenopteran insects, including honeybees (Apis mellifera) and European hornets (Vespa crabro). They analyzed the sounds according to their wavelength, frequency, call duration and more, and they found that there was a large overlap in their structure.
Owls hear a wider spectrum of wavelengths than humans. So the researchers tweaked the sound parameters to fit what an owl would hear, removing the highest pitches. They realized that the bats sounded even more similar to buzzing insects to owl ears than for human ones. “The similarity was especially strong when variables undetected by the owls… were taken out,” Russo says.
Then, through speakers, the researchers played back two insect buzzing sounds. One was the sound of a buzzing bat, the other was a bat’s social call to some captive and wild owls from two different species, barn owls and tawny owls.
Although hearing recorded bat sounds made the owls move closer to the source of the sound, it seemed to mostly jar the owls. They attempted to escape or distance themselves from the speaker, or at least inspect what was going on.
During the experiment, wild owls, which might remember getting stung by some flying insect, acted more scared and likely to try to escape compared to captive-raised owls. Russo and his team speculate this is because the captives never had an encounter with a stinging insect. However, so far, there is little scientific data on how often owls are stung by bees, hornets, and wasps on a regular basis, and whether they encounter them often.
“They surely know it is a dangerous encounter,” says Russo. That’s also why he argues this type of Batesian mimicry is probably a technique deployed when a bat has been captured and wants to buy itself some time to buzz off.
Future queries
As is always the case with such new findings, many questions remain.
Future work will have to replicate these findings in the wild, rather than in a lab, and with larger numbers of owls, in order to truly assert whether this is a type of Batesian mimicry, says Bruce Anderson, an entomology professor at Stellenbosch University, in South Africa, who was not involved in the study. Another question is whether the owls aren’t just scared by the volume of the bats’ buzzing, as they might by any other unexpected loud noise. “We may want to ask whether this is a case of mimicry or exploiting a sensory bias,” Anderson says.
It’s also still unclear whether, and to what degree, owls fear buzzing insects—although data seems to suggest that birds generally avoid nesting in cavities occupied by such insects. Researchers could also learn more about whether these buzzing sounds are unique to stinging insects or if other neutral insects can produce them. It would also be nice to test if owls who have been stung react with more fear than those who haven’t, according to David Pfennig, a biology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the study.
While mimicry is common and some cases of Batesian mimicry are well-known, much about it remains mysterious and striking, says Pfennig. He says that’s why findings like this are important. “Batesian mimicry provides some of our best examples of how natural selection can produce remarkable adaptation, including between very distantly related groups of organisms,” Pfennig says. There are other examples of acoustic mimicry between different species, like how burrowing owls can make hissing sounds that resemble rattlesnakes, but a mammal copying an insect seems to be a real first.
In the future, the scientists would like to fine-tune and expand their research.
“While it is always useful to validate observations in the field, our results were crystal-clear,” Russo says. “It would be interesting to find similar strategies in other species.” With over 1,400 bat species, as well as a handful of non-bat vertebrate species that buzz when disturbed, Russo guesses other species besides the one they studied may use the same trick.
The strategy of animals in cavities mimicking scary sounds to avoid predators could be, in fact, widespread, says Anastasia Helen Dalziell, an ornithology researcher at University of Wollongong, in Australia, who was not involved in the study.
“Most of what we know about mimicry has been gained from studies of visual mimicry, but in principle, mimetic signals could operate in any sensory [type],” says Dalziell. “It’s really great to have another example of acoustic mimicry… to help encourage a broader investigation of mimicry.”
Purdue University professor, Dr. Tesfaye Mengiste, looks at sorghum infected with anthracnose. Mengiste led a team of researchers who identified a single gene that confers broad resistance to the fungal disease. Photo Credit: Purdue University
Scientists with SMIL have developed a sorghum variety that provides natural resistance to pathogens and pests that have crippled the crop in humid, lowland areas of western Ethiopia.
Dr. Timothy Dalton, director of SMIL — based at Kansas State University — said the researchers’ work will “serve the broader sorghum development community and is a flagship global good, public characteristic of the U.S. land grant mission.”
The SMIL, led by Dalton, funded work in Ethiopia and West Africa to map genes and explore more than 2,000 pieces of germplasm in numerous field trials spanning several years.
“The new sorghum variety, called Merera, has multiple benefits, including resistance to pathogens and birds, and it yields better than current varieties that Ethiopian farmers have,” said Dr. Tesfaye Mengiste, a professor of botany and plant pathology at Purdue University, and the principal investigator for the research.
Mengiste said Merera has shown resistance to Anthracnose, a devastating fungal disease that attacks all parts of the plant — leaves, stalk and head — leaving almost nothing to be used for food (sorghum’s primary use in Africa), biofuels or animal feed (the primary use of sorghum in the United States).
“With these improved traits and yield potential, it can mean a better livelihood for (farmers),” Mengiste said.
A newly discovered gene, named Anthracnose Resistance Gene1, or ARG1, is unique, according to Mengiste.
“Although some natural resistance to fungal disease was known in sorghum, genes that confer widespread resistance have not been identified,” he said. “It is remarkable that a single gene leads to resistance across a broad spectrum of fungi and multiple strains of the Anthracnose fungus.”
Mengiste cited recent results with Merera that indicate up to a 43% increase in sorghum yields, which has led to increased income for smallholder farmers.
In 2013, USAID invested $13.7 million to establish the SMIL at Kansas State University. The lab’s primary focus is to improve the productivity, disease resistance, agronomy and economics of sorghum and millet in six partner countries.
In 2018, USAID renewed its commitment to SMIL, awarding $14 million over five years to continue the project’s work.
USAID funds several Feed the Future Innovation Labs across the country to harness the capacity of U.S. land grant institutions, other universities and the private sector to improve food security globally.
The sorghum variety recently developed for Ethiopia — while directly benefitting farmers in that country — is much like many other Feed the Future projects that aim to build knowledge to help farmers throughout the world, including the United States.
“Through this collaborative research supported by SMIL and the funding through USAID, we will continue to explore the rich Ethiopian germplasm to come up with the next resilient and high-yielding varieties,” Mengiste said. “With better leveraging of recent genetic technologies, we will expedite the development of the new generation of varieties or those in the pipeline.”
Purdue University professor, Dr. Tesfaye Mengiste, looks at sorghum infected with anthracnose. Mengiste led a team of researchers who identified a single gene that confers broad resistance to the fungal disease. Photo Credit: Purdue University
Scientists with SMIL have developed a sorghum variety that provides natural resistance to pathogens and pests that have crippled the crop in humid, lowland areas of western Ethiopia.
Dr. Timothy Dalton, director of SMIL — based at Kansas State University — said the researchers’ work will “serve the broader sorghum development community and is a flagship global good, public characteristic of the U.S. land grant mission.”
The SMIL, led by Dalton, funded work in Ethiopia and West Africa to map genes and explore more than 2,000 pieces of germplasm in numerous field trials spanning several years.
“The new sorghum variety, called Merera, has multiple benefits, including resistance to pathogens and birds, and it yields better than current varieties that Ethiopian farmers have,” said Dr. Tesfaye Mengiste, a professor of botany and plant pathology at Purdue University, and the principal investigator for the research.
Mengiste said Merera has shown resistance to Anthracnose, a devastating fungal disease that attacks all parts of the plant — leaves, stalk and head — leaving almost nothing to be used for food (sorghum’s primary use in Africa), biofuels or animal feed (the primary use of sorghum in the United States).
“With these improved traits and yield potential, it can mean a better livelihood for (farmers),” Mengiste said.
A newly discovered gene, named Anthracnose Resistance Gene1, or ARG1, is unique, according to Mengiste.
“Although some natural resistance to fungal disease was known in sorghum, genes that confer widespread resistance have not been identified,” he said. “It is remarkable that a single gene leads to resistance across a broad spectrum of fungi and multiple strains of the Anthracnose fungus.”
Mengiste cited recent results with Merera that indicate up to a 43% increase in sorghum yields, which has led to increased income for smallholder farmers.
In 2013, USAID invested $13.7 million to establish the SMIL at Kansas State University. The lab’s primary focus is to improve the productivity, disease resistance, agronomy and economics of sorghum and millet in six partner countries.
In 2018, USAID renewed its commitment to SMIL, awarding $14 million over five years to continue the project’s work.
USAID funds several Feed the Future Innovation Labs across the country to harness the capacity of U.S. land grant institutions, other universities and the private sector to improve food security globally.
The sorghum variety recently developed for Ethiopia — while directly benefitting farmers in that country — is much like many other Feed the Future projects that aim to build knowledge to help farmers throughout the world, including the United States.
“Through this collaborative research supported by SMIL and the funding through USAID, we will continue to explore the rich Ethiopian germplasm to come up with the next resilient and high-yielding varieties,” Mengiste said. “With better leveraging of recent genetic technologies, we will expedite the development of the new generation of varieties or those in the pipeline.”
Now, researchers say one of the bug world’s deadliest enemies—birds—could offer much-needed help in tracking insect numbers. That’s because studies of birds often contain substantial information about the insects they eat.
Those bird-related data are pretty much missing from current studies of insect declines, says Chris Elphick, a conservation biologist at the University of Connecticut (UConn), Storrs, and a co-organizer of EntoGEM, a research effort launched in 2019 that is combing the scientific literature for insect data. The project’s initial review of bird studies, for example, has unearthed some three dozen that tracked insect populations for 10 years or longer. (The researchers presented those findings at a recent Entomological Society of America meeting and are now preparing to submit a paper to a journal.)
Elphick and Danielle Schwartz, a conservation biologist at UConn who is also involved in EntoGEM, recently spoke to Science about the search for more insect information. The interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Why should we be looking for more data on insect populations?
Chris Elphick: People talk about global insect decline, but we don’t really know what’s going on globally, because we don’t have data sets from most parts of the world. We have good evidence that insects are declining in lots of places. But it’s also clear that insects are not declining everywhere and that not all insects are declining. The data we have are patchy and biased toward Western Europe and parts of North America. Our hope is that even if [new information] doesn’t change the story, it will give us more confidence in the current story because it will be more comprehensive. We’re losing biodiversity at such a rate that we really need to find ways to use the information that we have already and get it all in one place so that we can use it more effectively.
Q: What made you think to look for insect data in bird studies?
C.E.: It kind of started because we’re not actually entomologists! I’ve studied birds my entire career. Eliza [Grames, an ecologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, who was then a Ph.D. student studying birds], and another graduate student—entomologist Graham Montgomery, now at the University of California, Los Angeles—got thinking about how we do a better job of finding and using data we’ve already collected. Eliza initiated EntoGEM and started developing [software] tools for trying to search the literature more effectively. We started finding papers with data sets that were not mentioned in any of the analyses looking at insect declines. A lot of those papers were on birds because ornithologists were interested in what the birds were eating.
Q: Why were those data overlooked?
Danielle Schwartz: The first thing is the terminology. There’s a lot of different terminology that we’ve seen that wouldn’t necessarily imply insects right off the bat—[such as references to] “protein food.”
C.E.: It may often just be as simple as not putting the right keywords into the front end of the paper, so the search engines just don’t find it. As an ornithologist you might not use the word “caterpillar” in the title, abstract, or the keywords—and that’s the information that people search. [In addition,] if you’re collecting caterpillars because you want to know how much food there is for forest songbirds, you might mention caterpillars but you’re not going to list all of the species. Those data sets don’t have the level of detail that an entomologist might be interested in. But if you’re just trying to get a gross sense of whether forest caterpillars are declining, that might still be a useful data set.
Q: What has EntoGEM done so far with ornithology papers?
D.S.: We did an initial search and came up with 35,018 papers. Before reading through the abstracts, we use another program that Eliza wrote to [filter out those] that wouldn’t be relevant. And then once we start seeing a trend—for example, when I started seeing a lot of papers about snails—I can search by keyword and filter those out.
C.E.: We’re always trying to find ways to streamline [the process]. You can use [initial reviews] to build a statistical model to predict which of the remaining papers are going to be relevant. For every paper, we have a prediction of how likely it is to be relevant.
Q: How many papers have you identified data in so far?
D.S.: Somewhere around 150. … We’ve found something like 40 that have data that span at least a 10-year period. The studies are mostly clustered in Western Europe and North America. But we are starting to find a few examples from parts of the world [with] less information.
Q: What’s an example of useful data you’ve found?
C.E.: One of the first ones that [Grimes] found is this study of Harlequin ducks in Iceland. Harlequin ducks are these pretty fancy-looking ducks that nest on mountain streams. There’s this group [of researchers] in Iceland that has been studying them since the 1970s. They measured the number of chironomids—little midges—every year, because these ducks eat chironomids. They have almost a 30-year data set.
What I like about this duck example is that people don’t generally think about ducks eating insects. And it’s not the kind of place where you would think to go looking for a longtime series on insect populations. It’s an example of the kind of information that’s out there if you just go looking for it.
Q: Besides ornithology, are there other fields that might have overlooked insect data?
C.E.: Absolutely. There’s probably an endless number of places to look. Herpetologists, mammalogists … I’m sure there are botanists who collect a lot of data on insects because insects eat plants all the time. People who do forensics work collect data on insects. Whether they do it in a way that could contribute to understanding population change, I don’t know.
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