The Forest Service has been studying beetle-killed spruce for some time, but has yet to come up with any way of attacking the insects, other than suggestions of logging and controlled-burn fires -- each of which is hotly contested.
Researchers studied beetles because their 400,000 species represent about a quarter of all known species.
People who string words together for a living — generally a difficult, obsessive, detail-niggling tribe — tend to take inordinate delight in new slang, much in the way that people who study beetles love new bugs.
We used a large-scale chronosequence study spanning 50 years to study beetle diversity in uneven-aged silviculture compared with both short-term impacts and the longer-term legacy of even-aged silviculture.
For example, avoid writing, "Studying dung beetles like these teaches entomologists a lot about dung beetles like these".
Byrne was speaking from the group's field site on the edge of the Kalahari, some three hundred miles from Johannesburg; he and Dacke are there for two weeks, studying dung beetles around the clock.
Studying carrion beetles in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Mousseau encountered half-a-dozen Bougainville Island specimens that had been collected in the late 1960s and waited patiently for someone with sufficient familiarity with the genus Nicrophorus to recognise that they were different.
The researchers had been studying the beetles' ability to roll their balls of dung in straight lines by using the moon as a guide – they use the pattern of polarised light around the moon as a kind of celestial compass.
He started his career in forest entomology studying spruce beetles in Alaska, moved to Berkeley to focus on biological control of forest pests, and has been at Cornell since 1989.
A friend in another lab was studying seed beetles, and Tatar realized that the insects, easy to raise and manipulate, would make a good model for investigating his questions about aging.
