Kathrine

Thank you for joining me today. To start, would you mind introducing yourself, your field, and the main question your research group studies?

Professor Hamby

So I'm Dr. Kelly Hamby. I'm an Associate Professor and Extension Specialist in the Department of Entomology here at the University of Maryland. So my major field is entomology, so that's the study of insects, and the main questions that my research group focuses on is how to improve sustainable pest management in agroecosystems.

So we work in a lot of different agroecosystems with primarily insect pests, but also sometimes dazzling and other types of pests as well.

Kathrine

So what is integrated pest management, and how is it different from simply trying to kill pests with huge amounts of pesticides?

Professor Hamby

So integrated pest management is what I like to call it is a science-based decision-making tool. And the goals of integrated pest management are to maximize our yield and our ability to feed the world and have food and fiber crops, as well as profitability for the farmer, while also protecting environmental and human health. So typically this is done by using multiple tactics rather than one kind of silver bullet and trying to balance the pros and cons.

And then the question, how is it different from simply trying to kill pests? That's one of the major things when we say management, and actually it's even something that cancer doctors are thinking about too now, where do you have to get rid of every single cancer cell? Probably not.

You want to have it at a manageable level to where it's not causing damage. And some insects are out there and they're really not actually causing damage. So being able to recognize when is it a problem, when is it not a problem?

It's really the first step in integrated pest management.

Kathrine

So thinking back, what first made insects, biology, agriculture, or ecology genuinely interesting to you?

Professor Hamby

Well, you know, I think most people when they're growing up, they'll maybe like the outdoors or they like finding critters. I think as entomologists, we've noticed younger people tend to really enjoy interacting. And then somehow people are cultured about that being that critters are icky or they're scary, which is not necessarily the case.

So I was one of those, and it's true, I think of many entomologists, I was one of those people who was outside catching bugs when I was little. But I really solidified wanting to do entomology later in my studies because I did my bachelor's degree in environmental toxicology. And I was working in an aquatic toxicology lab that was studying how pollutants, including pesticides, were impacting aquatic organisms.

And a lot of toxicology is, it's really the study of what are the effects of these xenobiotics or chemicals that are not necessarily found in nature or in your body, right? And in doing that, I kind of realized, and this person who became my PhD advisor, Dr. Frank Zalem, he had worked with this aquatic toxicology lab. And a lot of his work was working to reduce pesticide inputs in almond orchards.

So he'd really managed to make the products that they used less toxic, the amount of products that they were using lower, and also worked on some things like growing grass underneath the trees to help reduce runoff, to really reduce that problem. So I was interested, that's when I first really became interested in flipping and thinking about how can we stop these from pollutants getting into the environment versus what are the effects of these pollutants on the environment.

Kathrine

So I guess that leads into our next question, which is, what is a specific research project that your group is working on right now, and what are you trying to discover?

Professor Hamby

Okay. So we have multiple research projects going on. I think that one, there's a couple of them that I'm finding really interesting, and I think that one that you might be interested in is, and as I mentioned, I work, I'm not commodity specific.

So my job in some places would have a specific clientele that I'm supposed to work with. Maybe that is corn and soybean farmers, or maybe that is whatever it is, but I'm not commodity specific. But I choose to work because Maryland produces actually a lot of corn and soybeans.

So I choose to work a lot with corn and soybean growers. And I also work a lot in small fruits because my PhD was actually on Spauda and Drosophila, which is a major pest of small fruits. And I'm also working in sweet corn.

But currently in corn and soybeans, so you may or may not know this, but Maryland corn and soybeans, they're some of the earliest adopters of no-till agriculture and also of cover cropping. So both of those practices have some benefits for reducing nutrient runoff to the bay. So they're trying to help phosphorus and potassium and things like that from getting, and nitrogen from leaving their fields and moving into the bay by having this cover crop.

So they're growing plants over the winter to suck up nitrogen, to build up biomass and organic matter and keep things from leaving the field. And then they're also reducing how much they're tilling over the soil. So there's less soil erosion and there's less movement of soil off their fields as well.

And so they have been doing this in this area for a very long time comparatively, and it's starting to diffuse throughout the United States, but it was really first worked out how to do it. And our farmers really figured out how to make that a profitable system, especially for corn and soybeans. But that system produces a lot of soil residue.

So you have a lot of plant material decaying on the surface of the soil. And what we've found actually is that that residue seems to foster a totally different pest complex to some degree. So one of the issues that our corn and soybean farmers face in these no-till systems is slugs.

So there's a couple of species of slugs that can kill the seedling of the corn and the soybean. And it's more of a problem in soybeans because soybeans, their growing point is above the ground. And if a slug kills the growing point, then the whole seedling dies pretty fast.

Whereas corn's growing point is actually below the ground, and they're less likely to kill the growing point in a corn plant. So slugs are a problem. Slugs are not an insect, but there's these ground beetles that feed on slugs.

And so that's how a lot of entomologists got involved in doing slug research. And so I'm part of a big collaborative effort to really try to understand how many slugs is too many slugs? How do we monitor slugs?

What are some of the things that we can do to manage slugs? So right now, the only thing that you can do is apply something called slug baits. So they are pesticides.

There's different active ingredients. Some of them are somewhat toxic and of concern for wildlife and humans, and some of them are less so. But they're all expensive.

And they're hard to use well to control slugs. But that's the only thing that we know for sure is effective at this point in time. And we're also not sure when and why we find really damaging slug populations and trying to predict that.

And so some of the things I've been thinking about is that we have two different species in Maryland, which is not necessarily true throughout everywhere. So we have both the marsh slug, or Duroseris laevi, as well as a gray garden slug, the Duroseris reticulatum. And it's possible that one of those slugs versus the other is more damaging.

That's one of the things that my lab is trying to understand. Actually, my research technician is currently doing a study in the growth chambers where he's comparing the damage of those two different species. And he's looking at different amounts of residue on the surface of these little, we call them mesocotoms.

So he's got basically a tray of soil with soybeans and cover crops inside it, or cover crop residue inside it at different growing conditions to see what the impact of slugs is on those plants. So we're just trying to understand in what situation are they killing slugs? And we've done a lot of work in the fields to try to understand that, try to correlate the populations and the damage to one another.

And that's what the big collaboration, that's one of the things that we're looking at. Slugs are so patchy and the data is so variable that it's really hard to really pin down. Sometimes lots more residue means more slugs, sometimes more residue doesn't necessarily turn up showing as many slugs as it.

So trying to figure out what's going on has been tricky. And so that's why right now we're doing a greenhouse study, well a growth chamber study.

Kathrine

I can definitely relate because my mom's vegetable garden in our backyard is also overrun by slugs. And it's very labor intensive because it's fairly small, so she is kind of able to go through each plant and pick them off one by one. And she also has this sulfur mix that she'll sprinkle around, which I guess has kind of been helping.

But I kind of just look at the plants and half their leaves are missing. So it's a little unsettling, I guess.

Professor Hamby

No, it's amazing. And that's what makes a pest, right? It's something that's going to consume a lot of area of the plant or cause damage that's really killing the plant.

That's how you know it's definitely a problematic organism that you're going to need to do something about. Yeah.

Kathrine

So next, could you walk, I don't know if like your field is very conducive to this, but could you walk us through one completed experiment field study or discovery? Okay.

Professor Hamby

So I'm going to switch a little bit gears to speak about a different insect that I have studied for a long time. So rather than telling you about one study, I will kind of tell you the path, the things that we've looked at and worked on and tried to figure out as a research community. So it wasn't just me by myself.

That's the other thing about my field. A lot of times we are working in interdisciplinary teams to try to solve the problem from multiple different angles, which is Spido and Drosophila. So it is related to the genetic model organism Drosophila melanogaster.

It's a very small little fruit fly. So same size as those that you'd find flying over your fruit bowl at home. And it was an invasive pest that invaded and came to the continental United States from Southeast Asia.

And when it first started invading, the first thing we needed to do figure out is how is it going to behave in this new environment? Is it the same as what people in Southeast Asia were seeing? And how is their production system different or the same as ours?

And what knowledge can we translate from what they've been doing? So we collaborated a lot with scientists in Southeast Asia to ask them, well, is this a pest in your systems? Why is it a pest or not a pest?

And what's different? And to start to figure out, so the first thing that I worked on in my PhD is how do we monitor this pest? How do we determine that it's in our field?

So we were comparing different baits and we know that they're attracted to rotten and fermented fruit. So we were basically mixing yeast and sugar and water to make sort of a fermenting bait. And then we were also using apple cider vinegar because apple cider vinegar is a fermentation product that smells a lot like fermentation.

And those are some of the earliest things. And we know that they're attractive to other Drosophila. So that's where we started.

And as you can imagine, that has now progressed to where you can buy a commercial lure that produces those smells and you can hang it over soapy water, which is nice because it's a lot clearer and a lot less goopy when you're trying to look at the insects inside them. We've also been, as a field, trying to make those traps more specific so that you don't have to look at every, because you're going to, in this case, there's lots of things that are attracted to fermentation. So you get lots of other insects in your trap too, which is non-targets.

You don't mean to catch, which is a problem for that reason. But also if you're a farmer and you're trying to find a small fly in a sea of insects, it's not that easy to use. So there's been a lot of work to try to develop something that's a little bit more user-friendly.

And then also colleagues have developed the other thing that you can do is you can monitor for the larvae in the fruit and how do you make it easier to see whether the larvae are in the fruit or not. And so this case, what you do is you slightly crush up the fruit and you put them in a salt or sugar water solution, which makes them float out. They leave the fruit and that makes it easier to find them.

So that's an easy way to tell, oh, I have a problem or I don't have a problem. And it's time to start managing this pest.

Kathrine

Yeah. So I actually did some light research on these fruit flies. And I guess the whole problem with this versus the fruit flies that have already been here is that they'll eat fruit that hasn't rotted yet.

Is that correct?

Professor Hamby

That is correct. So they have the females, their egg-laying structure or ovipositor is serrated like a bread knife. And so they can actually cut through the skin of a fresh or ripening fruit.

And they actually do prefer like that. That is their niche, a fresh and ripening fruit versus an overripe fruit. But I like to put them in the context of the other fruit flies because they will also use overripe fruit.

They just prefer ripe fruit. And that's why they're causing direct damages because they're directly laying imperfect fruit, their eggs.

Kathrine

So I guess moving on from a research perspective, what does a typical day look like for you? And how is your time divided between teaching, fieldwork, lab work, meetings, and mentoring students?

Professor Hamby

Well, I'm going to walk you through today because it's the one I can remember, but I'll also give you kind of more generally. So today I started, we started at seven o'clock, me and one of my undergraduate researchers, we got in the truck and we drove over to the Y Research and Education Center in Queenstown, Maryland, where we are monitoring for slugs. Well, actually at this point, we just finished the last sampling.

So we monitor for slugs for up to six weeks after planting in soybean fields. So we reached our sixth week after planting. So we monitored for slugs.

And then we actually converted our slug traps into something called a soapy water trap, because as I mentioned, my research technician needs slugs for his experiment. So we've been catching slugs and bringing them back to the lab. And we have a slug colony that he's been using to do those greenhouse, those growth chamber experiments.

So then we, so we caught some slugs first thing this morning. And then I'm also collaborating on a project. So a piece of my research.

So I mentioned I'm an extension specialist. So I teach graduate students. I teach undergraduate students, but I also teach farmers.

So I gave them this information that I've been developing or information that other people have figured out. So I find science-based solutions for their issues. So in doing that, one of the things is, you know, it's a two-way street of communicating, like, what are their needs?

What do they want research wise? And I try to target my program based on what is causing them issues or things that they need to know. And then I also tell them the answer and hope that they're going to change their practices and move towards adopting more IPM.

And in these conversations, you know, sometimes we're having, we're giving PowerPoint presentations or we go out to the field and we show them in the field on a field day. But this really interesting program started in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where instead of making it sort of this, we're teaching them an occasion. And we're also talking to them on the side, what are your issues?

They really found that framing it as a competition really gets people engaged. So right now, what we're doing is we have a farmer competition. So they get replicated plots of land on the farm and they get to choose what we do with it.

How many seeds are you going to plant? What kind of seeds are you going to plant? And then in this case, I'm monitoring for slugs.

Do they want to play a slug bait or not based on the slug monitoring that I'm doing? And I'm also monitoring for insects. Are you going to make an application of insecticide at R3, yes or no?

And they're competing for who is the most profitable, who gets the highest yield, and also who is the most efficient or who have got the most yield for the amount of input they put in. And so we think it's a really good tool for learning. They can also market their grain so that that helps them lock in different prices depending on the day.

So it's basically like running a farm on a very small scale and seeing how you stack up. And we think that that helps us understand what kinds of decisions farmers are making. And they also tell us what kind of choices they want to add in and things that they can experiment with.

And it gives them an opportunity to try something where they're not going to lose any money. So maybe they want to do something crazy that they would never do on their farm. So I had to go scout those fields and tell them how many insects there were.

And then we also recorded a little video to give them an update about that. Then I came back, had lunch, managed to squeeze that in. And then my master student had her first committee meeting.

And we talked with her committee about her planned research proposal for her master's. And now I'm meeting with you.

Kathrine

Wow, that is honestly like the most exciting day that I've ever heard.

Professor Hamby

Well, I have to say, we have a very high heat index this week. So it is hot.

Kathrine

Yes, I was out in the heat yesterday.

Professor Hamby

I'm in the field all week this week. It happens. So it just so happens.

Kathrine

I never imagined to be hearing about that kind of competition between farmers. But that's definitely like a very novel idea. And wow, I could never have thought of it.

Professor Hamby

And tomorrow, I'm going to our Beltsville farm. And Thursday, I'm going to our Wimrock farm. But so in the summer, I do a lot.

I'm outside a lot. Because we have a lot of field research, and we have different kinds of data that we need to collect for these experiments. So like I mentioned, we're correlating slug populations with slug damage.

So we were taking stand counts and looking at how many soybean plants were there next to these traps that we had versus the number of slugs that we've been counting in those traps this whole season. And that's for the research piece. But I also do laboratory research.

So we have a lab. And I left part of my team behind in the lab, and they were taking care of the slug colony. And what else did they do today?

They were probably identifying insects from our spotting drosophila traps, entering data, checking the data, making sure that everything looks right. We have moth traps out there. Arthur was taking down his experiment, and getting the temperature data off his data loggers.

Things like that are happening in the lab. And then as I mentioned, we do greenhouse and growth chamber experiments too. So we can have experiments going on.

And sometimes we do field experiments in the winter too. So we do have experiments going on year round. But typically right now in the peak of growing season, I'm outside a lot.

Either looking for insects to tell people, hey, you better watch out. This is starting to become a problem, or because I have research that I need to take data on that's growing out there right now. Yeah.

I was going to say, in terms of teaching, in the summer, I don't do any teaching. Because there are summer sessions, but it's my peak research season. So I don't typically teach in the summer sessions.

And then in the fall and the spring, I teach integrated pest management, which is an upper division undergraduate biology class that accounts for an upper division lab. And I teach that every other year. And so next spring, I will be teaching that.

And then I also teach teaching. It's called professional development and teaching for life scientists, I think is what it's called, to our graduate students. And I also teach professional development to our graduate students, which is a bit more about how are you going to interview?

How do you do career planning? Those types of things. And so that's also a graduate class.

So on days where I teach, the teaching, depending on what the class is, my IPM class meets twice a week for three hours. So when I'm teaching, I'm spending some chunk of my week actively teaching and then a bigger chunk of my week preparing to teach, usually, getting the lecture ready or getting the lab supplies ready, things like that. And then I have, as I mentioned, actually, I have a higher percentage of what my job requirements are, are to teach farmers and work with farmers.

So that's why some of the things that I'm doing in terms of sampling insects is directly research, where it's a question I have that I'm trying to answer, again, applied something that you growers could use. But sometimes I'm trapping them just to tell farmers, because that's part of what my job is, is to tell them, oh, you better be on the lookout. This insect is starting to reach higher populations.

Make sure you're looking in your fields. So I write articles for farmers. I also, in the summer, we have what we call field days.

So last week, I was at on the eastern shore in the evening, where we walked them through the research that we're doing on the farm. And so we walked through some blackberry and blueberry variety trials at two farms. And that was the person who was organizing it.

And I talked about blackberry and blueberry pest management, and what are some pests you should be on the lookout for at this time of year. And we looked at what that damage looks like, and how you might manage those pests. So I teach in the summer, that's what it looks like.

And then in the winter, it's a little bit more like a lecture for farmers, but it's at meetings. And this continuing education they need, because they actually have to have a pesticide license, and they have to have a nutrient management license. So they have to get this continuing education to maintain their licenses.

So I offer, I'm part of the programs that offer those continuing education.

Kathrine

Wow, I'm really glad that you're doing all that blueberry stuff, because I actually have like a ton of them in my backyard, that I planted in like these actually pretty ginormous pods. So I'll definitely take a look at the articles that you wrote about pests, although I haven't gotten any. Hopefully that doesn't happen.

Professor Hamby

No, that's the beauty of blueberries. They are difficult in terms of getting the soil pH just right to make them happy, if you can get, but if you can get them happy, I think they're one of the lower maintenance in terms of pest management crops, because they have that nice thick skin. Technically, they can get spotting drosophila.

More often, there's a couple of the June beetles, the green June beetles, Japanese beetles that like to eat the leaves and the fruit that can sometimes be a problem. But even those, I think they're not at a high enough number that it's really a big problem.

Kathrine

So my final question is, what is a realistic step that a high schooler who is interested in entomology could take this month?

Professor Hamby

Oh yes, to explore entomology, agriculture, pest management. Oh, so there's lots of opportunities out there. One thing that I think is really cool is, and I think this is true of many fields of science, is we have a National Entomological Society of America.

So that's the society for our science. They have a lot of cool resources on their website, and they also have meetings that are regional and national. So sometimes people, depending on the meeting, they host different events.

So for example, my branch, Eastern Branch, when it meets, we have something we call a Bugs World, and we put out an open, it's an event where people can just come and learn about entomology. At the University of Maryland, we do something very similar on Maryland Day. I don't know if you've been to Maryland Day, but it's an open house at the university, and our department puts on an insect petting zoo, where you can come and see live insects and talk to entomologists.

So keeping an eye out, I think, for events like that. There's a Maryland Entomological Society, and then there's also the Entomological Society that's based out of Washington, D.C., and they have Zoom and in-person meetings where people who are interested in entomology can come and hear whatever their monthly meeting is talking about. One of them meets at the Smithsonian Museum, and the other one meets, I think, at the University of Maryland Baltimore.

So you could join a group like that. It's another way to kind of get connected and learn more about entomology. In terms of agriculture, there's a lot of great stuff through Extension.

Each county has an Extension office, and they have 4-H and Master Gardener trainings, and they have different events where they're teaching people about agriculture, about entomology. They connect with local schools. So that's another cool way to kind of get involved, especially over the summer while things are going on.

There's also a lot, as I mentioned, those places also produce kind of online resources or lectures a lot of times. So the Northeast IPM Center, for example, has an IPM toolbox webinar series, and they record their webinars. So there's actually a lot of posted webinars about agriculture, entomology, pest management issues that you can find on University Extension websites.

So those are all, I think, pretty low-hanging fruit in terms of kind of connecting and learning more. And you never know, you could cold email an entomologist and ask to have a Zoom recording meeting as we answer our email. But I think there are also, you know, I think a lot of the high school programs now, sometimes we get invited to come and participate with, like, speak with a scientist, or the insect zoo travels to different schools and shows, or schools travel to University of Maryland and learn about insects.

So there are also connections that are happening within the community to connect people with these kinds of fields as well.

Kathrine

Yeah, so I think the insect petting zoo is a wonderful note to end on. Thank you so much for sharing your work and advice with me. I really appreciate your time, and I think students will a lot from hearing your perspective of what it is to actually be out there in the fields.

Professor Hamby

It's great talking with you.