Anupreksha Jain

Outreach activity on "Insect Antenne & Chemical Signals". Authors: Emilie Parkanzky, Elizabeth Hrycyna, Anupreksha Jain. Audience: General public, booth/expo setting, all ages.

The workshop will be on Weds Nov 12, 9:30am-12:30pm PT, at A105, OCC.

Lastly, Insect Ambassadors will be participating in a workshop on "Entomology Outreach on Parade! Bridging Institutions to Share Innovations in Student-Driven Outreach". We will be sharing some projects and activities designed by our program and customized for diverse audiences across generations 🪰🐜

Symposium talk titles

Symposium talk titles

Symposium poster titles

Selfie with workshop instructors and participants holding up their mini-collections

Speakers include @crazbuglady.bsky.social, @monarchjv.bsky.social, @fuzzibumblebee.bsky.social, and more! And there will be 4 posters including my own about a workshop organized by UW-Madison Insect Ambassadors at the Wisconsin Society of Science Teachers annual conference. #FITatEntSoc25 🪲🕸️

Symposium on "Buzzing with Knowledge: Supercharging K-12 Outreach by Empowering Educators". Tues, Nov 11, 8-11 am PT, in Portland Ballroom 253, OCC. Talks by: Kelly Carruthers, Kaitlin Campbell, Katie-Lyn Puffer, Doug Golick, Elaine Evans, Caitlin Silva, Ted Snyder. Posters by: Emily Justus, Amanda Lorenz, Elise Bernstein, Anupreksha Jain.

I have also organized a #FIT section symposium on activities aimed at empowering K-12 educators to incorporate insects into their lessons. Featuring presentations from educators and outreach practitioners from a variety of backgrounds, and lots of opportunities for networking! #FITatEntSoc25 👩‍🏫🦋

Presentation on "Pollinators in a pickle: Bumble bee behavior and resilience to thermal stress under pesticide exposure". Monday, Nov 10, 9:12-9:24 am (PT) in D136, OCC. (In Grad 10-min Competition: P-IE, Bumble Bees). Presented by Anupreksha Jain from UW-Madison.

On my way to Portland for #EntSoc25 ✈️ ! Excited to catch up with old colleagues, make new connections, share my research, and discuss outreach strategies.
I will be presenting preliminary data from my PhD thesis chapter on bumble bee behavior under pesticide exposure and thermal stress 🐝🌡️

🐝🏅🥹

Projector screen displaying the conference logo featuring a royal bengal tiger.

A tote bag and a green notebook, both featuring the conference logo.

Thrilled to have made it to Kolkata for #Behaviour2025! It’s a full circle moment for me as my interest and career in biological research started right here at a KVPY camp I attended just about a decade ago. And grateful for the nicest conference swag! 🐅

Hi! I am Saaj's friend from Cornell! I am going to this conference too (presenting on the 30th) and look forward to connecting!

Hi Sushant, I am going too and presenting on the 30th. Looking forward to connecting again!

Ethomics for Ecotoxicology: Automated Tracking Reveals Diverse Effects of Insecticides on Bumble Bee Foraging and In-Nest Behavior Synopsis. The majority of flowering plants depend on insect pollination for reproduction and declining pollinator populations pose a threat to biodiversity

paper up now :) academic.oup.com/icb/advance-...

Beautiful documentary covering research from all over the US on bee declines and conservation. Our work on the combined effects of pesticides and extreme weather on bumble bees is featured at ~45:45. Incredibly cool filmmaking by @neillosin.bsky.social and team! 🐝🥵📹🧪

ICB's
#Foraging Under Fire: A #robotic flower system incorporating multimodal signaling and aversive stimuli
Joshua Foley , Skylar Mathieson , David Zollinger , Melissa R L Whitaker
doi.org/10.1093/icb/...

#pollinators #bees #insects #research #scientists

very insightful and important paper! i look forward to digging in

Flyer advertising a special collection in Environmental Entomology titled Plant Volatiles in Insect Pest Management and Sustainable Agriculture.

Please share! Do you work at the intersection of plant volatiles and insect management? 🌿🪲
Submit to our special issue in Enviro Ent: Plant Volatiles in Insect Pest Management and Sustainable Agriculture. MS drafts due Aug '25, anticipated pub. Feb '26; DM for details!
@entothompson.bsky.social

Lead author Auke-Florian Hiemstra holds the oldest known caddisfly casing containing microplastic, dating to 1971. Photo: Liselotte Rambonnet.

A caddisfly casing with pieces of blue microplastic, dating 1986. Photo: Auke-Florian Hiemstra

NEW PAPER, JUST OUT! 👀

Insects from the '70s and '80s were already collecting microplastic, decades before the term microplastic even existed. 🤯

A thread on the surprising history of this pollutant and the incredible insect larvae that helped us uncover it. 🐛

Let's dive in! 🧵👇 1/x

Inchworm Caterpillar Automaton by Dawlight | Download free STL model | Printables.com A simple automaton depicting an caterpillar crawling around a leaf | Download free 3D printable STL models

check this out: www.printables.com/model/892037...

What's the email address?

Happy #WorldWildlifeDay. A friendly reminder that livestock cannot replace native biodiversity, despite what you may have heard.

Our new paper, based on data from 1,705 studies, shows that pesticides are toxic to organisms they are not intended to harm, including fungi, microbes, plants, insects, & vertebrates such as ourselves. Questions the wisdom of applying over 3 million tonnes of them every year...

That Really Is a Live Owl's Eyeball, Seen Through Its Ear Some say that eyes are the windows to the soul. But in some owls, the ears are windows to the animals' eyeballs.

One of the neat things about owls is that you can see their eyeballs through their ears, if that isn’t superb I don’t know what is #SuperbOwl

Snake-mimic caterpillar, Hemeroplanes triptolemus, Sphingidae from the Amazon rainforest near Puyo, Ecuador. When disturbed this larva of a sphinx moth expands and exposes the underside of the first body segments, mimicking a snake head with black eyes and even ...

Happy Year of the Snake everyone! 🐍🧧

新年快樂， 萬事如意！祝大家今年「蛇」麼都好, 「蛇」麼都順！

(+ Enjoy this stunning photo taken by Andreas Kay of a Snake-mimic caterpillar, Hemeroplanes triptolemus. flic.kr/p/FKqQA4 - cus bugs are just awesome like that 😎)

#LunarNewYear #YearoftheSnake #Bugsky

Recently attended a talk by Stokes Baker (Detroit-Mercy) along those lines

Shedding light on overlooked pollinators: Global insights into floral interactions of velvet ants (Hymenoptera: Mutillidae and Myrmosidae) The Journal of Applied Entomology publishes the most current research in applied entomology, including mites and spiders in terrestrial ecosystems.

We still need to figure out whether this pollen reaches any flower stigma and fertilization takes place. But this is as much as we could get from citizen science data for now 😉

Read more about all this reseach here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

In prep! I'll post here when published :)

Abstract: The vast majority of flowering plants depend on insect pollination for successful reproduction, but many pollinator species are in decline due to anthropogenic stressors, with dire consequences for biodiversity conservation and food security. The intensive use of insecticides in conventional agriculture has been shown to adversely affect the physiology, behavior, and performance of non-target organisms at even trace but field-relavant concentrations. However, there are significant knowledge gaps in our understanding of simultaneous effects on different types of behaviors in a realistic plant community context. Here we used a combination of low-cost high-throughput computer vision and machine learning powered tools and individual tag tracking to investigate the sublethal effects of imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid, and flupyradifurone, a novel butanolide insecticide, on Bombus impatiens nesting, foraging activity, and flower visitation in a semi-field environment. By advancing our knowledge of the sublethal impacts of pesticides on bumble bee behavior, this work contributes to the development of informed strategies to safeguard pollinator populations and pollination services. Further, this protocol can be powerful and effective for comprehensively studying multi-modal effects of various stressors on bumble bee behavior, informing the development of sustainable agricultural practices and conservation strategies.

A pink zinnia flower. On it, a bumble bee with a black and white tag stuck to its thorax.

Excited to be heading to my first #SICB2025! I'll share my work on "Automating bumble bee tracking to study sublethal impacts of pesticides on behavior" on Mon, Jan 6 at 10:30 am in International Salon 4 as part of a complementary session to the plant-pollinator symposium 🧐🐝🌺📊

A 6-panel comic. In panel 1, two people talk against a snowy backdrop. In panel 1, the first person says "Did you know that if you rearrange the letters in SANTA, you get something sinister?" and the other says, "Yes: A ANTS." In panel 2, the first person says "Wait, no, that's-" The second says, "How do you think Santa finds his way to all those homes at night? Pheromone trails!" In panel 3, we're down in an ant nest. "Once the night is over, Santa returns to the North Pole, mates with the Queen Claus, and dies." There's a festive ant nest with an ant-bodied Mr and Ms Claus looking at each other lovingly. Panel 4, "The Queen begins laying eggs that will hatch into next year’s workers." The Queen lays eggs, and the workers are ant larvae with elf heads. Panel 5, "Next December, she will produce fertile Queens and Santas and the cycle will begin anew." The Queen lays eggs with both Santa and Ms Claus heads. In panel 6, we return to the two people talking, and the second person says "Of course, one queen must best the rest in combat, and the workers can't interfe-" "Stop." "But I haven't told you about the Santa-mimic spiders!"

Happy Christmas Eve. Every year I inflict this upon you, one of my least popular comics ever. Enjoy!

congratulations, well deserved! <3

Know any promising students interested in plant-insect chemical ecology? The Whitaker lab at ETSU has two open master's positions for the 2025-2026 academic year!

Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

A bio of an insect seller. Particularly, it writes, “…sustainably sourced critters and art…”

An Instagram post of the seller mentioned in the first photo. It features various specimens of beetles, stick insects and lanternflies. Some of the specimens have labels of their origin country and collection date.

I’ve found a ton of Instagram insect sellers who slap “sustainably sourced”, but never seem to elaborate what they mean by “sustainable”. Curious! So I checked their pages to see what I can find.

This one didn’t even try to hide it. You can see labels stating origin country and collection date. 1/9

Please add me 🙋‍♀️
And I'm sure you get this all the time, but your paper on bumbles damaging plants to accelerate phenology is so cool!!

🙋‍♀️🐝💻