A good fellowship application takes time to craft, so if you are thinking of coming to the UK and are interested in climate change effects on insect reproduction - including different life stages, eggs, micropyles, imaging, microscopy, thermal limits, ecological physiology, plants and microclimates and more - now is the time to think about it! There are different schemes to consider, depending on eligibility criteria:
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Last Friday, 9th February, I travelled to Nottingham to visit my colleagues, Sonia Gomez, Belen Sanz (ANLIS, Argentina) Helen West, Dov Stekel, Anastasia Kadochnikova (University of Nottingham, UK), Paula Avello (University of Leeds, UK) and Lisa Collins (University of Surrey, UK), to talk about our research on antimicrobial resistance in chicken litter. This was the first visit (and last sadly!) for our Argentine collaborators, Dr Sonia Gomes and her PhD student, Belen Sanz. We discussed our upcoming results, and it was great to celebrate the first output from this UKRI/BBSRC/CONICET funded project, Dr Paula Avello's article in Health and Policy Planning, titled "National action plans on antimicrobial resistance in Latin America: an analysis via a governance framework". Here with co-authors we used qualitative text analysis to build a picture of the national policy plans for antimicrobial action in Latin America. We assessed strengths (e.g. coordination and partecipation), and opportunities for further improvements - for example, incorporating the environment in future iterations of the plans. I have been so busy over the last semester, that time as flown by, and I have not written to introduce Luke Crosby on this blog. Luke worked with me for a summer internship in 2020, and then in spring 2023 as a research assistant. I am absolutely delighted that Luke has started his PhD with me thanks to a University of Lincoln studentship. Since last October, Luke has been growing kale to feed lab and field populations of the large white butterfly (also known as cabbage white, Pieris brassicae). He also been extracting data from articles for a meta-analysis we are working on, as part of a larger collaboration with members of the Special Topics Network on Thermal Fertility Limits. This is a very lively and active community working on heat stress effects on reproduction. Welcome Luke, it's great to have you on board! Amazing news, my international exchange project to work with Sylvain Pincebourde (CNRS, France) was funded in May 2023! Sylvain and I have started working on linking microclimate (his expertise) and butterfly fertility (me). As a start, Sylvain visited Lincoln in June 2023 and we trialled two different thermal imaging cameras to measure temperature on wild and domesticated cabbages as well as eggs, caterpillars and pupae of the large white butterfly, Pieris brassicae. The wild black mustard, Brassica nigra, plants came from seeds that Nina Fatouros, Wageningen University, shared with me, while we grew kale (Brassica oleracea spp.) from organic seeds. The two thermal imaging cameras (FLIR E54 and FLIR T540) worked well, with the FLIR T540 comfortably outperforming the FLIR E54. No surprise there, as the price tag of the FLIR T540 is almost double that of the FLIR E54! The good news is that we can pick out the temperature differences across the leaves. This work was also done thanks to Teun's efforts - Teun is my summer Erasmus research intern for 2023. I look forward to developing this collaboration over the course of the next few years. Time is a tyrant and, as I have write this, my summer Erasmus student, Teun de Jong, has almost finished his internship. I first met Teun in Wageningen, in February 2023, during my visiting fellowship to the lab of Nina Fatouros. Teun was fascinated by my work on thermal fertility sensitivity in the large white butterfly, Pieris brassicae, and the experimental set up that Jamie Smith had worked on during last summer 2022 for his MSc research (as a side note, congratulations to Jamie on securing a PhD at the University of Hull!). Luckily, he secured an Erasmus research internship to come work with me in Lincoln this summer 2023! Teun has worked very hard this summer to replicate Jamie's experiments heating wild pupae of the large white butterfly, and measuring the effects of heat on butterfly reproduction success and fitness. Teun arrived the last week in May 2023, and, in a happy coincidence, I had just received news that I had been funded by the Royal Society for an international exchange with Sylvain Pincebourde. Teun therefore, started trialling different thermal imaging cameras with Sylvain's help. Following this, Teun launched into rearing butterflies and plants, setting up experiments and troubleshooting the butterfly's lack of interest in mating! I have thoroughly enjoyed working with Teun, who is looking for a PhD. I can highly recommend him, he is hard working, dedicated, and I have no doubt he will find a suitable project to pursue and excel in. It all started with an email in late August 2022. I wrote to Nina Fatouros at Wageningen University and Research (WUR), to ask her for some images (SEMs) of Pieris brassicae eggs. Over a few brief email exchanges, we discovered that we both shared an interest on insect eggs, and that we could learn from each other's different angles (mine on the evolution of reproductive traits, Nina's on plant-insect interactions). Nina invited me to apply for a Visiting Scientist Fellowship at WUR and then fast forward to 30th January 2023, I found myself on a train crossing the Channel heading for Wageningen, the Netharlands. I spent four intense (and fun) weeks at the Biosystematics Group, WUR. Nina, her PhD student Liana Greenberg, and I, drafted some hypotheses on latitudinal and climatic gradients effects on eggs of populations of Pieris spp. Nina and Liana have collected Pieris napi from across Europe, from Wageningen to Spain. Nina also has two stable populations of Pieris rapae and brassicae, which she has kept in the lab for a number of generations. I then spent several days in the company of Marcel Giesbers, a very knowledgeable SEM technician, to image Pieris eggs using Cryo SEM, which was a lot of fun (oh, and talking of Dutch cheeses with Marcel...). I have learnt a lot about plant-insect interactions (and dusted off my two botany exams taken decades ago), started a collaboration with an amazing colleague, and visited the Netherlands for the first time! I was made to feel at home by every member of the Biosystematics group, and I am indebted to Nina, Klaas, Eric, Liana, Wilma, Marcel, Patrick, Jordy, and everyone else at WUR + WEES for inviting me to give a talk. I really hope to be able to come back soon. Now the Royal Entomological Society annual conference is over, it's time for some reflection. With two colleagues, Sheena Cotter and Paul Eady, we organised this small annual meeting bringing together enthusiastic entomologists from the all over the world. This was the first hybrid (in person and online) conference run following the pandemic, and so it was exciting as well as daunting, getting the technology right, and hoping that people would want to meet in person. Ento22 run from the 13th to the 16th September 2022 at the University of Lincoln, UK, with several enticing pre- and post- conference activities (women in entomology, mentoring session, rewilding tour, music) and a post-conference workshop organised by the Global Insect Threat-Response Synthesis (GLiTRS). I felt so priviliged to be able to listen to our plenary speakers: Sylvain Pincebourde, on the importance of microclimate for insect responses to climate change, Jessica Ware, who gave a masterclass on how to weave research with creating a diverse space to study insects, and Nalini Puniamoorthy, who talked about all things insect-reproduction. I had a lot of fun. We had huge help from University of Lincoln professional services, and from Luke Tilley, Fran Sconce and Bianca Saccone of the Royal Entomological Society. I knew I would enjoy it, I just had not realised how much I missed meeting people face-to-face, talking science, and networking. It was hard work with three growing boys, juggling childcare, husband away, but I would do it all again (I am not sure Sheena agrees though!). For more action from the conference, search #Ento22 on Twitter. I have two main research streams: the evolutionary and ecological effects of climate change on species reproductive traits and antimicrobial resistance. I haven't talked about my current project on antimicrobial resistance in a long time. In 2018, I attended a workshop on a UK-Argentina joint funding programme in Buenos Aires. At the workshop, I met Helen West and the rest, is history. Helen and I, together with Andrew Singer (CEH Wallingford), Dov Stekel (Dov and Helen at the University of Nottingham) and Lisa Collins (University of Leeds) put together a bid to study antimicrobial resistance in poultry in Argentina. Our project was funded in 2019, but then was delayed by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. To cut a long story short, project work slowly resumed over the course of 2021, and now we are beginning to see the early fruits of our work. In 2021, Lisa and I, interviewed for a postdoc to be employed on the project and were delighted to appoint Dr Paula Avello Fernandez. Paula is a mathematician and is originally from Chile, which is an incredible asset for our project. With the work in the chicken sheds delayed in Argentina, and therefore temporarily missing precious modelling data, Paula threw herself into the part of the project that I lead: policy. Having reviewed key antimicrobial resistance policy documents from all of South America, Paula is almost ready to submit her first manuscript from this project. With COVID-lockdowns and teaching commitments, I had not been able to meet Paula in person. We finally remedied to that this month, when we met over coffee and had a lovely in-person chat! With the simulated heatwaves experiments well under way, and the behavioural experiments finally progressing, we can breathe a sigh of relief. Since Sofia Gigliotti joined us in April 2022, we have been so busy preparing experiments, sourcing caterpillars and setting up the field study, that this is my first post in four months and Sofia has left us! However, it is a sign that we have been working very hard to make our British Ecological Society-funded large project work.
Jamie Smith has been in charge of looking after the Pieris brassicae pupae. He has released them in their field enclosure and they have mated, produced eggs and the caterpillars have successfully hatched. He has then set up the simulated heatwave experiments and is attempting cross-matings between heated individuals and controls. Fingers crossed it works out! Meanwhile Electra is investigating the behavioural thermoregulation of caterpillars. Originally we were hoping to use large white (P. brassicae) too, but we had to source some new ones when the first batch died - I do wonder whether our heated diapause caused them physiological stress (see for example, this new work by Nielsen et al 2022 on Pieris napi). Electra has worked against all odds as two more batches of caterpillars did not make it! She is now working with a third batch sourced from the wild, and things are finally looking better. Writing this, I realise the last time I put (virtual) pen to paper, was back in October 2021! Lots has happened on our project on heatwave effects on butterfly fertility generously funded by the British Ecological Society. I wrote how thanks to all of the efforts that Luke Crosby put last summer, we have a healthy number of pupating large white butterflies (Pieris brassicae). Jamie and Electra, my two master students, have been setting up experiments to induce the end of diapause in some of the pupae. Their efforts have started to pay off as you can see in this image. Meanwhile, Jamie is also working on fine-tuning the micro-heater for our heatwave experiments, and Electra is working on designing behavioural experiments on how caterpillars regulate their body temperature using their posture and location. Next week, a new student will join us from the University of Pavia, Italy, Sofia Gigliotti. Sofia is an Erasmus student and will help Jamie and Electra look after the pupae, be involved in the experiments and hopefully have a good time too!
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AuthorGraziella Iossa Archives
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