Transcript:

music; ambience: sounds from the lab

A beetle larva provides a tasty morsel for a hungry ant, but glistening on the end of the larva’s hairs is a drop of what could be a potent chemical defense. Welcome to Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries, a glimpse of the world of science from the inside. Laura Eckman is an undergraduate student at Trinity College. A Biochemistry major, she’s been spending long hours in the lab getting to know the defenses of the immature delphastus, a type of ladybird beetle.

“What I've been doing with these animals is studying the droplets that sit on the tips of small hairs on their bodies, usually in the immature stage. I'm trying to figure out what chemicals are in these secretions and to try to find out if there are any chemicals that haven't been discovered before, which would be really neat, to find something that nobody has ever seen before. I'm trying to find out whether these secretions serve as a deterrent to other insect predators.”

Laura will eventually conduct a bioassay, a trial with live insects, to test how ants react to immature beetles, both with and without the secreted droplets. But in order to conduct the tests, Laura needs an ample supply of delphastus beetles, which means an ample supply of their food of choice, the white fly, which in turn means ample supplies of their foods of choice, tobacco and collard plants.

“I try to keep the humidity and the temperature up to keep the white flies and the beetles happy and healthy so that they reproduce and so the species that I'm trying to study doesn't die out.”

Laura’s research on the delphastus beetle’s predator repellent could one day lead to new, natural insect repellents for humans.

Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries are made possible by the National Science Foundation.

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