One of many B-movies based on a giant insect rampage.

I like sci-fi. I’m not your typical Star-Wars nerd, instead I like B-movies. You know… the low-budget creature feature movies that entail some giant creature killing everything in sight? They’re fun, campy, not at all meant to be taken seriously, yet can be useful in teaching about biology due to their reliance upon urban legends. Still, some things about them do get on my nerves.

Let’s take an episode of the television show Fringe: Immortality (13th episode of the 3rd season). Fringe is your typical X-Files wannabe show with writing that’s sub-par even for prime-time TV. The show centers around investigators who investigate apparent criminal abuses of science. And there’s a doomsday device in a parallel universe, somehow woven into the plotline, which feels like a very uncreative and poorly done rip-off of the parallel universe in the Doctor Who episode Rise of the Cybermen.

Anyway, the Immortality episode is about entomology, in which a mad scientist genetically modified a sheep parasite which somehow has a protein which cures a deadly flu. The episode made no sense to me for reasons I’m going to get into in a few moments, but there’s something more important I’d like to get to first because I think it’s an important part of how scientists are viewed in popular culture.

If you watch the episode, something jumps out at you rather quickly. These are people who are chasing a man who uses insects to commit murder. Yet, the people who actually know stuff about insects are given less than 10 minutes of airtime. Furthermore (at least in this show) scientists are generally written as shallow, boring or creepy people and this episode was the epitome of that. “Bug Girl”  (at right) in this episode was little more than eye candy and the main characters seemed really impressed by someone who was spewing statistics jargon with the grace of a freshman student who is struggling to get a C. It was sad, and just another reminder how commonly scientists are treated information spewing machines by television writers.

A friend of mine (the original Bug Girl) wrote a piece critical of the episode. In particular, she criticized the resident entomologist for looking a bit too stereotypical. Entomologists have gone through a transition in how folks view them. People used to see entomologists as a nerdy guy in a khaki vest, but more recently we get someone decked out in full goth regalia. Truth be told, I’m fine with this because it’s not as bad as how people view other closely related disciplines like geneticists. Plus, I’ve met entomologists who dress fairly similarly to this in real life.  Some of my fellow graduate students regularly don full biker regalia to work. Ultimately, I think it’s funny how you almost never see a scientist in their traditional gear: jeans and a cheap T-shirt.

Blaberus discoidales by DigbyRigby via PhotoBucket.

When doing a TV show that involves insects, you’re beset by some rather interesting limitations. There are only so many insects available on the market and the type of storyline you do revolves around what you can get and how easy it is to handle. In this particular case, they used some sort of Blaberus species roach. I’m thinking Blaberus discoidales, mostly because they look about right, are fairly cheap, and would be easy for a TV producer to get.

In the wild, they mostly live in caves eating bat poo, but in the Fringe ‘verse they’re apparrently known as Skelter beetles which were a parasite of sheep which became extinct in an unexplained manner which Abrams thought was somehow irrelevant to the plot. Now… if they’d have mentioned they were related to something like water pennies or said something about a ‘missing gonopore’, I’d have forgiven the crappy writing, but they didn’t.

I halfheartedly jotted down some notes while watching the episode. Here’s my summary of this train-wreck interspersed with some scientific facts.

The episode opens with two guys in an airport-type building. The older dude switches the younger dude’s drink and ominous music ensues. Fortunately for the younger guy, instead of getting hit with a roofie he instead drank some invisible beetle eggs. The eggs somehow managed to hatch and consume him from the inside out, gaining an incredible amount of biomass within a few minutes.

Parasitoid wasps grow from an egg the size of a comma to a grain of rice in a week. Percentagewise, this is a HUGE increase in biomass. Total biomass, not so much. These beetles take about 20 minutes to go from microscopic eggs to inch-and a half long insects.

Anyways, the old dude follows the now sick young dude into a bathroom stall and some screaming ensues after which you see the older guy getting the hell out of there while still managing to keep his shoes clean. At first, I was thinking roofie… but then you see tons of beetles and then you suddenly remember that you’re watching bad sci-fi.

After a rather poorly compiled intro sequence, you see some federal agents bantering and happily collecting bugs from a guy who just died. There are a few scenes with a bunch of stuff that’s probably relevant to some sub-plot I don’t care about but they eventually arrive at a relatively stereotypical entomology lab where there are people pinning a seemingly unrelated assortment of bugs for unexplained reasons with someone’s pet tarantula laying randomly about on a table.

If we assume it was a taxonomy lab, they generally work on one group of insects whether it’s a single family of beetles, flies or mantids. This was just a hodgepodge of random invertebrates.

Bug Girl incorrectly ID’s a cockroach as a beetle and hits on a fairly uncharasmatic agent who has no real role other than to sit around and look kind of menacing. During the course of her mis-ID, she announces that an aircraft station was an unusual habitat for beetles while seemingly oblivious to the fact that beetles are found almost everywhere on earth.

A few minutes after she goes away, one of the creepy statisticians informs the crew that they weren’t in the midst of an outbreak… which kind of makes me wonder why they weren’t wearing protective gear in the first scene as well as why they were traveling and thus exposing more potential targets to the terror attack. She also tells them that ‘statistics’ suggest they’ll get at least two calls if the agents tell the public there might be a biological terrorist attack going on. This impresses the agents, who apparrently don’t realize that putting out a phone number and asking for information is essentially telling every crank in the world that they’re willing to listen to any sort of insanity.

Of course, creepy stats girl was correct because they get inundated with waaay more than two useless calls as well as one which tells them about a beetle expert which Bug Girl should have been able to find with a quick google search. They eventually decide to track him down… and hey, guess what… he’s the bad guy! This is rather convenient for the team because they’ve got like half an hour to track down a fairly incompetent scientist.

It turns out the beetle expert is trying to rear the beetles in humans to create a flu vaccine from the adult beetle.Why he didn’t merely create a cDNA library before his beloved beetles went extinct (or from preserved specimens stored at -80) and order an expression kit will forever remain a mystery. Making copies of the beetle genes for the desired proteins and then using your colorimetric assay to find the protein of interest after producing them in bacteria seems a lot easier than killing multiple people and working in an underground lab. Either way, the crew tracks him down and one of them manages to get nabbed by the not-so-bright scientist.

There’s some confusion by the Fringe team over whether or not the cute girl is infected after she got kidnapped. To fill the rest of the time slot, the scientist gets yelled at, some guns are drawn, he pulls a beetle out of his neck and it turns out cute girl isn’t infected with Skelter beetles (which would have made the show marginally better), she’s just pregnant and her boyfriend isn’t the dad.

This show is in it’s third season. Firefly didn’t last one season. We’re in desperate need of good science fiction and good roles for scientists on TV… this is just more proof of that.

If you live in certain areas of the south, it’s really actually very similar. There are lots of rowcrops… peanuts and soybeans instead of corn and soybeans but still a similar concept. Lots of crops. Everything’s green and pretty without a whole lot of biodiversity. There’s one other major difference, though…lots of areas look like this:

Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

The green curtain draped over everything? Kudzu.

Kudzu was a vine originally planted to control erosion which grew out of control. It grows quickly, is hard to kill and covers everything with a green blanket and crowds everything out by keeping sunlight from reaching the plants. The trees under that green carpet are all dead.

So… how can things get worse?

Simple, really… just introduce something which lives on kudzu.

In 2009, a graduate student at the University of Georgia’s department of entomology found a very odd insect which resembled a beetle, but wasn’t. It had sucking mouthparts and a bunch of other features which landed it in a group of insects called the Heteroptera. The problem is that the insect wasn’t able to be identified with any of the keys available for the US. It was a new family which hadn’t been recorded in the New World before. The insect was eventually identified by another group of researchers as belonging to the family Plataspidae, and the species found was Megacopta cribraria, which lives on Kudzu but also on beans.

Megacopta species are known pests of various beans, including soybeans. From a recent review of Megacopta biology:

A number of authors report that Megacopta spp. are pests of soybeans. Soybean yield loss ranged from 1-50% depending on density of the bugs. The reported pest status ranges from minor to severe. As an introduced species, this bug appears to have potential to be a pest of legume crops in the United States.

They also invade houses during the fall while looking for a place to overwinter and can be smelled from some distance away, so they’re an urban pest as well.

The pest status of this species isn’t really certain; experimental crops infested with the species showed no apparent damage, I can’t find any information about thresholds for this species in particular and a lot of the information out there seems to be for the genus level and not this particular species so I can’t tell how well it’s been studied in it’s native range. There just simply isn’t enough information at this time to say if it’ll be apocalyptic, a flash-in-the-pan concern or something in between which is dependent on region, weather and/or biotype.

However, it’s considered a pest species in most of it’s range and this still presents a serious potential problem for soybean growers in the south because we now have a species that quickly reproduces, can grow to huge populations and which has a refuge which quite literally covers the entire south.

D. R. Suiter,1 J. E. Eger, Jr.,2 W. A. Gardner, R. C. Kemerait,3 J. N. All,4 P. M. Roberts,5 J. K. Greene,6 L. M. Ames,, & G. D. Buntin, T. M. Jenkins, and G. K. Douce5 (2010). Discovery and Distribution of Megacopta cribraria (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Plataspidae) in Northeast Georgia Journal of Integrated Pest Management

So what makes Braconid (and Ichneumonid!) wasps so strange, and why am I writing about them on Biofortified?

Well, it turns out that Braconid and Ichneumonid wasps actually modify their hosts genetically by doing something which very much resembles gene therapy.

Most of the time we modify organisms because we want them to do something they currently don’t do. To use the example of BT corn, the corn plant was a better host for the European corn borer than we liked, so we took a protein from a bacteria which was known to kill the larvae which bored into the stalks but also known to be harmless to mammals and made the corn produce the protein which harmed the caterpillar and thus made a relatively bug-proof crop as far as the major pest was concerned.

Well, the caterpillars also produce genes which are bad for the wasps…these genes are involved in the immune system. The immune system’s role is to kill foreign invaders and if you fall under that category, you’re going to need a way to flout the immune system. The wasps in the video above accomplish this through a very strange symbiosis: they inject viral particles into the caterpillar to knock it’s immune system out.

These viruses are very strange because they contain very few viral genes. Many of the genes they contain are actually very similar to the immune system of the wasp. They don’t replicate, but they travel to certain points of the fat body and nervous system and begin producing proteins which have a great many functions, from increasing the amount of food the caterpillar consumes to producing proteins which interfere with immune functions.

It may seem odd to some that a blog that mostly focuses on controversies in modern agriculture would ask someone who studies insects to write on their site, but it’s not as counter intuitive as you think. Insects are a huge part of agriculture because they are our biggest competitors for food. One of the most common types of genetically modified corn, the various BT cultivars, were developed to fight the European Corn Borer, Ostrinia nubilalis, which is a tiny Crambid moth which burrows into the stalks of the plants and eventually kills them.

An entomologist writing for a site which explores the politics of Genetically Modified Organisms makes sense for another reason, and that’s because entomologists sometimes modify the genes of insects in order to do their work. Some of this occurs naturally, through the actions of polydnavirus particles some parasitoid wasps inject into their hosts to control the behavior, development, and immune reactions of that host. Sometimes it’s simple and artificial such as releasing insects sterilized with X-ray radiation in order to fight diseases and crop pests. Some of the things that entomologists work with aren’t necessarily insects but are used to control their populations. A great example of this is the modification of viruses as systems which are used to deliver pesticides directly to the insects rather than spraying the environment with pesticides.

What I hope to do is to use this site to educate the public about some of the GMOs you may hear about on the news, and I hope to make people realize that these are wonderful inventions that better humanity. New things are definitely a little scary at first, but education is the best way to overcome these fears.

Since this is my first post, let’s explore some really basic insect biology that might be necessary to understand parts of my posts. Insects go through two types of development: hemimetabolous, or incomplete metamorphosis and holometabolous which is commonly known as complete metamorphosis.

Here’s an example of hemimetabolous or incomplete development. The video below depicts the life cycle of a cicada which begins as an egg and then develops through a series of nymphal stages before maturing into an adult. Notice how the adults are very similar to the nymphs with the obvious exception of wings. Also notice how they have a relatively similar ecological role, both feed on sap but in slightly different areas.

This is an example of holometabolous development. The butterfly in the video has a very strange parasitic relationship with ants. This butterfly goes through four stages: egg, larva, pupa and adult. Notice how the larva looks nothing like the adult, and how the larva has a completely different role than the adult. In this case, the adult feeds on nectar from flowers while the larva is a parasite in the ant nest.