by Joe Ballenger on 10 January 2012 If you’re not a long time reader of Biofortified, you might not know that I study parasitoid wasp physiology when I’m not armchair-quarterbacking head louse treatment studies. It’s not often that parasitoids end up on the news, so when they do I get super-excited. I’ll be writing this from the perspective as a parasitoid biologist. A shorter article which does an excellent job of tackling misconceptions about this paper discussed here can be found at Biodiversity in Focus.
When I was an undergraduate, I spent about a year or so working as a beekeeper. It was a fun job, and I learned all sorts of fun facts about bees. By this time I had been interested in parasitoids for nearly a decade and a half, having raised parasitic wasps out of caterpillars since I was five. Naturally, I attempted to see if there were any parasitoids which attacked Apis mellifera but I always ended up empty handed and disappointed. This always confused me because there were parasitoids which attacked ants, termites and caterpillars living in ant nests. I never understood why parasitoids had never been documented attacking honeybees.
This changed earlier this week, when a description of a parasitoid fly which attacks bees was published in PLOS ONE: A New Threat to Honey Bees, the Parasitic Phorid Fly Apocephalus borealis by Core et al. Unfortunately, the authors tried way too hard to connect the fly to Colony Collapse Disorder, but I’ll discuss that later. First…
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by Joe Ballenger on 23 December 2011 I think it’s safe to say that most folks have had experiences with lice. Every entomologist I’ve ever met (including myself… buy me a few beers and I’ll tell you) has at least one entertaining pubic louse story. Head lice are a childhood rite of passage, with most kids being infested at one point or another. They’re generally harmless with the occasional secondary infection, but infested kids are prone to teasing and other forms of exclusion by classmates. Distraction due to constant itching can also be a problem. Since schools don’t want children being infested for obvious reasons, kids are sent home because of infestation, resulting in parents missing work. Even though lice are mainly nuisance pests, they’re still a pretty big economic pest and account for billions of dollars per year in lost productivity.
When lice strike
Head lice are something almost everyone has to deal with, and head lice treatments are something someone buys every once and awhile. These are big business in and of themselves. Because they’re big business, many firms have started popping up offering louse treatments with varying degrees of effectiveness.
A while back, I went through my own head louse ordeal with my daughter. Treatment was complicated by a family member who didn’t realize they were infested. We originally thought the lice were resistant to treatment, so I had to get a second treatment. Since then, I’ve become curious about what is for sale in stores for Over The Counter (OTC) head louse treatments and generally take a look at whatever treatments I can when I get the chance. Over the years, I’ve become surprised at how many dubious treatments are offered for sale (although perhaps I shouldn’t be) and how many of these use questionable advertising techniques mostly built upon fear rather than science. Many treatments offered for sale over the counter are either unproven, or have been proven not to work.
First, let’s discuss some headlouse biology. Then, let’s discuss how the treatments currently FDA approved work. In Do OTC Head Louse Treatments Work? Part 2: Questionable treatments, I’ll discuss the dubious treatments.
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by Joe Ballenger on 30 November 2011 Times are tough for science communicators right now. We’re in the middle of a funding crisis, and folks are still taking advantage of grants for personal gain. There are domestic terrorist organizations which target graduate students doing animal research which is especially terrifying to me because I’m a graduate student doing animal research. Although there are new, effective science communicators taking prominent places in popular culture like Neil Degrasse Tyson there’s less science on TV than ever before with once great TV channels like TLC and The History Channel falling prey to bad reality shows and rank quackery. Heck, even the Discovery Channel caves in at the thought of a little controversy which is just about the worst thing for science.
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by Joe Ballenger on 22 November 2011   I just returned from Reno, Nevada attending the Entomological Society of America’s annual meeting. I went to a bunch of really neat talks, saw some old friends and met some new friends. It turned out to be a great networking opportunity, and I met some folks doing amazing research I would really like to work with in the future. Unfortunately, I wasn’t presenting data because I missed the submission deadline but I was still fortunate enough to be on the debate team.
The topic of the debate was “can organic agriculture solve food scarcity problems?”. The subjects were randomly chosen and don’t necessarily support the views of those engaged in the debate, so I will not speak for anybody but myself. I was on the con team, and we were charged with arguing that organic agriculture is an inferior method of food production. We were up against a very good team and all day folks were coming up to us and telling us how much they enjoyed our debate. Ultimately, we won the best overall debate team and took home an engraved trophy and left the meeting $125 richer after splitting a $500 prize between the four of us.
My role on the team was to look into the pesticides used in organic agriculture and their treatment regimes. To my surprise, I found that organic operations actually increase the amount of inputs put into the environment by requiring higher concentrations and more frequent applications of pesticides. The insecticides used in organic ag are often less effective, less selective, and can have greater non-target effects than synthetic insecticides. Some organic pesticides, like the biopesticide Beauveria bassiana, are assumed to have a very low environmental impact quotient (EIQ), but haven’t been tested for potential ecological side effects. My position (and position on the debate team) is that GMOs like Bt corn are better for the environment because they decrease the amount of pesticides that we must put on crops and that organic pesticides are worse for the environment because they must be constantly reapplied in very high concentrations.
This, however, wasn’t the idea that earned me my stripes during the debate. During the Q&A session, somebody asked us to clarify why we thought organic ag was able to innovate to a lesser extent than sustainable or conventional agriculture. My response was that we can modify pesticides to become less toxic, more easily degradeable and more difficult for insects to detoxify by producing insecticides synthetically and making it more or less difficult for the insecticides to degrade. While organic ag could certainly benefit from new chemistries, they reject them as soon as modifications such as these take place because the new pesticide is synthetic. In short, organic producers are unable to take advantage of novel chemistries. I used the example of adding carbon atoms or benzene rings in a specific place to keep beta-lactam antibiotics medically relevant during the debate, but there was a much better example I could have used but unfortunately neglected to discuss. But, hey… that’s what the blogosphere’s for isn’t it?
Very recently, the lab of Reddy Palli has figured out a way to genetically modify an organism to become a spray-on pesticide. To fully understand and appreciate what’s going on, there are a lot of things I need to explain. Fortunately, I’ve got about 12 hours of travel time ahead of me. Awesome, right?
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Do OTC Head Louse Treatments Work? Part 2: Questionable treatments
Editor’s note: Thanks to Joe for Biofortified’s first post of 2012! Here’s to a great year of science blogging!
I like to think of myself as a skeptical blogger. I like to engage in critical thinking about scientific issues because this is an important aspect of my job as a graduate assistant. When I move into the workforce, I’ll still need some basic skills to parse evidence because this is my job as a scientist. Mythbusting is a great opportunity to do this, and I enjoy discussing things which may help people who read my posts whenever I can. Being an entomologist gives me some rather interesting opportunities to do this, which is leading me to discuss head lice of all things.
In my last post, Do OTC Head Louse Treatments Work? Part 1: Mechanisms, I explained how the most commonly used FDA-approved treatments worked. In addition to those science-based products, there are many products that have no evidence of efficacy behind their claims, and that rely on fear to make a sale. What I’ve seen deeply concerns me not only as a scientist trying to make the world a better place, but as a parent trying to raise my daughter the best that I can. In this post, I’ve taken a few commonly sold products and listed some ways in which I think they play fast and loose with their claims.
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