Ask an Entomologist

Written by Joe Ballenger

This question was very unique. We had a person in the AaE Facebook inbox reach out to us after she had been diagnosed with a meat allergy, most likely from a tick. After a conversation with her physician, she had wanted to know more about how ticks work. The physician wasn’t able to answer her questions about bugs, so she reached out to us.

The start of this week’s post: the Lone Star Tick, Amblyomma americanum. The females can be easily ID’d by the white spot on its back.

Unfortunately, since her query contains medical information, I’m not really comfortable posting it here. However, it’s important because tick-associated meat allergies allergies appear to be on the rise, and it’s a good idea for people to have a resource to understand what’s going on from the entomological side.

Researching for this post was an unexpected treat, as well. Normally, when I do a post, I have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to find. This was a rare post where, even though I knew the subject was interesting, the story ended up being a lot more interesting than I thought it would be.

What I feel makes this story really unique is how it bounces around a lot of disciplines. It starts with the first organ transplants, involves a lot of cancer biology, and then ends up talking about conservation practices in the Southern US.

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Written by Joe Ballenger

Name: Shamus

You Question! Or Comment. =): Do you have any knowledge on insects in western Canada during/following wildfires? Do certain insects have protective measures they take during wildfire, or do they just leave the area?

Morning Commute pic.twitter.com/yAqZQjYLnp

— Nature is Scary (@NatureisScary) December 13, 2017

For the people living in California, it kind of sucks that this is a relevant question. It sucks that a lot of people have lost their homes, or their lives…and it’s really hard to write a post like this without acknowledging their tragedies.

However, at the same time, there’s an ecological reason for this. Wildfires, in many environments, are a normal part of life. Lots of plants are well adapted to occasionally catching on fire. There’s even an entire field of study for figuring out how and why the environment depends on fire-it’s called fire ecology. Some plants, like Lodgepole pines, need fire to keep existing. Some plants, like Cogon grass and some species of Eucalyptus, have even evolved to purposely catch on fire. There’s even a scientific term for that latter type of plant…they’re called ‘active pyrophytes‘.

The reason large swaths of land occasionally catch fire is pretty easy to understand. Some plants have evolved to snuff out the competition by burning out everything around them. This means that there will be both a layer of fertile soil and no competition for the next generation of plants.

Fire ecology is pretty cool, and we could dedicate an entire blog to how and why various plants use fire to their advantage. But this is a blog about bugs, and each of these plants which have adapted to fires have bugs which eat those plants.

So…how do bugs deal with fires in their natural environment?

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