Wayne State study seeks insight into the evolution of parasitic wasps

DETROIT - Glen Hood, Ph.D., assistant professor of biological sciences in Wayne State University's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, was recently awarded a National Science Foundation grant for his study of parasitic wasps.

The four-year, $310,874 grant from the Division of Environmental Biology of the National Science Foundation will focus on why parasitic wasps attack some insect hosts but not others. This work will involve the study of hundreds of insect species that specialize on oaks - one of the most ecologically significant and common trees in North America.

"This collaborative research, with Andrew Forbes, Ph.D., professor of biology at the University of Iowa and Kirsten Prior, Ph.D., associate professor of biological sciences at Binghamton University, aims to understand how evolution works reciprocally to create new species," said Hood. "We are investigating a hyper-diverse group of insects called gall wasps and the parasitic wasps that attack the gall wasps. The parasites lay their eggs inside other wasp species and then the young wasps eat their insect host from the inside out."

The researchers will document the parasitic wasps that attack each gall wasp and, accordingly, discover which insects those same wasps do not attack. A major goal will be to infer which insect defenses are effective against each type of parasitic wasp, as well as determining how and why parasites might shift between different insect hosts over time. Parasitic wasps are important predators that control the population sizes of other insects, and developments from this research could have important implications for managing forest and agricultural pest insects and human disease vectors.

"Some species of wasps are like no other organism on the planet," said Hood. "The wasps induce three-dimensional tumor-like structures that are made of plant matter, referred to as galls, on oak trees. The gall wasps place their eggs coated in venom containing enzymes and proteins, which reprograms the plant genome, forcing it to be expressed in an entirely different way. In this case, it tells the plant to send as many resources as possible to this part of the plant where the insect egg was laid. The immature insect larvae feeds on the inside of this structure where it grows to adulthood, protected from the elements and other insects."

Hood said many researchers believe the planet is in the middle of a new mass-extinction period. He believes that if they can understand how species interactions help other species evolve, they can understand how to possibly counter a mass extinction.

"A common ecological strategy is to escape your predators. These wasps live in and on plants, so they might switch to another type of plant to escape. They would then have an enemy-free niche in which they are free to evolve," said Hood. "If one of these preyed-upon wasps escapes these parasitic wasps, do the parasitic wasps follow them? That could lead to patterns of co-evolution. The ultimate goal is to understand the origin of species, and how one species splits into two or more. If we can answer that, we get more insights into how evolution works as a whole. We also are trying to figure out the processes that create these patterns."

"This grant will not only further academic research, but it also will accelerate career mobility and train the next generation of graduate students in evolutionary ecology," said Ezemenari M. Obasi, Ph.D., vice president for research & innovation at Wayne State University. "The grant funds graduate student research funding opportunities that includes travel to national conferences to present research and conduct field work across various locations within the United States."

The award number for this grant from the Division of Environmental Biology of the National Science Foundation is 2418251.

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