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By 2050 world  food production will have to increase by 50% to feed an estimated global of 9 billion people. Thats a lot of mouths to feed! Insect pests, such as aphids (tiny sucking insects) can lead to crop losses due to direct feeding damage, plant virus transmission and/or supermarket rejections. The number of chemicals available to control insect pests is declining due to new European laws. As such there is a need to develop new ways of controlling insect pests in a sustainable way and this is where my research comes in.

The organism I’m working on to control aphids is called Pandora neoaphidis. It is a fungus that kills aphids and  poses no harm to other insects.

The effectiveness of using fungi as organisms to control aphid populations is greatly effected by the temperature in the field, since fungi are living organisms. Under extremes of high and low temperatures the fungi are unable to grow and therefore kill aphids. As part of my work i am looking at the ranges of temperatures under which certain species of fungi used as biological control agents can function and therefore be effective at killing aphids.

The picture below is of one such experiment. The spores of the fungus are stained blue so we can see them more clearly under the microscope. You can see that most of the spores have germinated meaning they have squiggly lines growing out of them.

Other organisms as well as fungi can kill aphids. Parasitic wasps do this in a pretty gruesome way! They lay their eggs inside an adult aphid. The wasps eggs develop and the adult wasp eats its way out of the aphid! Straight out of a horror movie. This is a picture of one of these wasps under a microscope…

A typical day consists of an exciting mix of reading papers, analysing data, killing aphids with fungus, walking through fields looking for sick looking insects, eating cake and drinking a hell of a lot of coffee!