Insects

An insect with a short reproductive cycle.

If you have to do everything in your home (no fancy growth chambers, greenhouses, or other support) then I would use crickets or mealworms, or a stored products pest like lesser grain borer, or Indian Meal moth. Crickets or mealworms can be gotten at any pest store that sells lizards, spiders, and other small predators. Keep the colony warm, say 25 to 30 C. Anything below 20C will cause you trouble.

Make sure you have a control group.

Plan on devoting some time to the project: Colonies basically need some sort of tending every day. The cleaner you keep the colony the more likely you will have a successful project. That said if you miss a day it is not a big deal, if you miss a week you might have a dead colony. Some days colony care might take a few seconds just to see that nothing is wrong.

Where you go from here depends on what resources you have and which insect you choose. Just knowing the lifecycle is useful: how long does it take to go from egg to 1st instar, to second instar, to adult. Demography is used to understand how fast organisms develop how fast they reproduce. Likely range they will occupy if they invade your country or if there is even a risk of invasion. Another common experiment is to look at mortality. What could a person do to manage the pest. A typical house might have stored 2 to 50 kilograms of grain depending on access to a store and available discounts for purchasing larger quantities. This is in contrast to a grocery store that might have 1000 kilograms of grain or a producer/mill that will have many times that quantity. If control is not your thing, then nutrition is another easy route. This works if you need treatments. You could also use temperature as a treatment but you then need a way to control temperature and measure temperature.

There are other choices. Find a group of insects in a field or forest close to where you live. Aphids are a good choice, but some insects that live under rocks or fallen trees also are good choices. You can look at predation or parasitism rates. The main problem is that this is best done in the spring or summer. This is a bad suggestion for winter months.

Thank you for your input. Yes, we have all the fancy stuff available - the project will be performed in a university laboratory!

Next question: are there insects already in culture? If professor Bob rears mosquitoes, then that might be an easy insect to work with because Bob has already encountered all the problems you will face and has solved them.

Timothy A Ebert Sorry for the late response. No there is nothing in culture yet. We need to lift off the whole project from scratch. Mosquitos seem like feasible insects to use given this situation. Do you mind enlightening me on any (recent) mosquito-related research topics if you are familiar with these?

Is this a "minor project" as in an undergraduate student needs a second project for fun while they are working on finishing their degree, or is this a minor project where a faculty member needs a quick publication to flush out their tenure packet?

The latter I cannot help because I am not that familiar with the literature.

The former, I would suggest not mosquitoes. They need a blood meal. They carry a variety of diseases. It is risky to go outside and catch a couple of mosquitoes and start a colony by letting them feed on you. If you use some animal to provide blood meals there will be care of laboratory animals in some review panel. You might be able to use small pouches of blood as an artificial diet. However, I don't work with mosquitoes so you will need to use the literature. All of this is well worth the trouble if that is an area you are interested in and have the time to go through whatever steps are needed to conform to applicable regulations. You might also read a few papers to see how they describe their research. If there is some thought about publication, then you need to consider what the journal will require even if your institution has no such requirements.

If you have a big budget, then molecular questions may be interesting. The sort of genomics, metabolomics, and such.

There are questions about systematics, life histories, ecology, and so forth. Most organisms are not studied in enough detail. Even major medical, veterinary, or agricultural pests are poorly studied. There are a few flagship cases that are exceptions, but even there we do not know everything. It also does not hurt to redo past experiments. Just because one person found "this" to be true does not make it a universal truth no matter what the social stature of the person who did the research. It does not matter if it is published in Science with a color picture on the cover. If it was done once then it should be done again, and probably a few more times after that.

Timothy A Ebert I'm an undergraduate and here in the Netherlands we can choose these 'minors' in our educational program. It is a complete course program with courses like anatomy, dissection etc, and finally, a project. So it's not a fun second project like you may have during e.g. an internship. We are given six weeks to write a project proposal and once that's approved we are let loose to work on the lab for 12-15 weeks I think. It is part of my Bachelor's programme.

Although we have a limited budget for materials (reagents, not necessarily equipment), our biggest limit is the time we are granted on the lab.

Anyway, thank you for your input, it's really helpful so far. If you stumble upon any additional information I'd be glad to hear from you again!

Netherlands is kind of cold this time of year, so not many insects out and active.

My guess is that you will have to use whatever you can get.

Someone must have an insect colony by design or accident. You might talk to someone who operates a greenhouse. They often have pests (thrips, fungus gnats, whiteflies, aphids, mealybugs, spider mites, and so on). Of medical interest are mosquitoes, bedbugs, or head lice, or fleas, or black flies, horse flies, no-see-ums, sand flies, kissing bugs, and so forth. A pet store might have meal worms, crickets, cockroaches.

So what is available? What are your real options?

As I can see now there is a lot (!) to choose from. I believe we can facilitate most insects you mentioned. I remember that previous year some students had stick insects and they built a pretty big terrarium-like housing for them - with the expenses being covered. So you see, with regards to buying insects and facilitating some kind of housing for them, we have a lot of options since we can create them (money is not my biggest concern although I have some limitations ofcourse.)

Rather, I'm looking for a concrete direction to look for interesting bits of research questions. I'm really interested in toxins, for both their medical and biotechnological values. For this I'm reading the attached paper. They mention wasps, which also sounds interesting. I'm not easily stimulated so I tend to look for things that really have some kind of exciting edge to them - hence toxins. If you know something else that's exciting in a similar way please let me know.

I greatly value the input you have given me so far!

Article Insect toxins – selective pharmacological tools and drug / c...

That could be cool.

All insects have defensive and many have offensive chemistries. They may be on the cuticle, or in special glands.

Extraction is not particularly difficult, though it may be time consuming if you have to dissect a gland out of the insect. Sometimes it is easy. The scent gland for the squash bug is bright red.

Now for the challenges. The yield per insect is often low. There are usually a wide assortment of compounds that get extracted. Identifying a specific compound of interest can be difficult. Usually some sort of chromatography is used. The classic was using paper chromatography with mustard plants and placing the paper in with some beetles. The beetles ate a specific spot out of the paper. The reason was that the spot contained a phagostimulant.

The compounds are used by the insect for defense, attack, communication, or sometimes tricking other insects. An example of the latter are insects that live in ant nests.

For uses by man you might improve success by using insects associated with specific environments. If you want an antibiotic try insects that live in bacteria rich environments (rotting meat, dung).

I haven't been in touch for a while but we came up with our global idea for our little project.

The main subject will be resistance to antibiotics and the potential for insect antimicrobial peptides as an alternative to antibiotics, which has already been widely proposed. We plan on comparing the potential antimicrobial acivities of crude protein isolates from the cuticicle versus hemolymph of an insect that we yet have to choose. Extending this, we want to try and identify antimicrobial peptides in the protein extracts using a mass-spectroscopy approach. In addition, we want to investigate whether a diet containing bacterial antigens increases the gene transcription of a particular antimicrobial peptide, but we still need to figure out whether this is even theoretically feasible to investigate.

An appropriate insect would be a cheap one from which enough hemolymph can be harvested so that, preferrably, a small amount of insects need to be used for protein isolations. Our initial idea was going for grasshoppers, but I figured you might suggest better alternatives.