Cricket Communication and Insecticides (December 2024)

From ccesrpublic@umn.edu Cedar Creek Community Engagement

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Lunch with a Scientist is an ongoing monthly lecture series at Cedar Creek. Each month, scientists present a general-audience lecture about their work at or related to Cedar Creek and take questions from the audience.

The series has been running since January 2019 as an in-person program. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, it was shifted online in April 2020, from which point recordings are available. Programs take place on the second Tuesday of each month (11:30am central time), either in-person at Cedar Creek, via zoom, or both. Details about speakers and delivery mode are at https://cbs.umn.edu/cedarcreek/public-programs/lunch-scientist

Program Description

On a summer night in your backyard, male crickets serenade their chirpy songs to attract females. Females, on the other hand, use male songs and other courtship phenotypes to make decision about who to mate with. These behaviors evolved long before humans arrive. Today, we are changing the world rapidly. As a result, many animals are forced to attract and choose mates in a human-altered environment that is profoundly different from those where the behaviors evolved. What does this mean for the animals and what may be the consequences? In a LCCMR supported project, my lab will sample soil and invertebrate community in agricultural lands, protected natural areas, as well as urban and suburban sites across the state to understand what insecticides are found outside the application areas and at what levels. Using the local field crickets as a model system, we will then ask how sublethal level of insecticides affect reproduction and sexual selection.Beyond the LCCMR project, we are also asking novel questions on the consequences of sublethal exposure on speciation and stability of the communication systems in animals.

About the Researcher

Mingzi is an evolutionary biologist broadly interested in the evolution of animal behavior. She is particularly interested in the evolution, genetics, and genomics of sexual communication systems as well as environmental and human impact on mate choice and sexual selection in natural populations. She integrates field-based behavioral and lab-based genomic approaches in answering fundamental questions about the evolution of acoustic communication using crickets as a model system.

Mingzi received her B.Sc. from Fudan University in Shanghai, China and Ph.D. University of Oklahoma with Dr. Ola Fincke. During her Ph.D., she has also been a Pre-doctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, where she studied the Neotropical giant damselfly in Panama for two years. Upon finishing her Ph.D., she joined Dr. Kerry Shaw's lab as a postdoc at Cornell University. Mingzi joined the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at University of Minnesota as a President's Postdoctoral Fellow in 2019 and has been promoted to assistant professor in the same department in 2022. In her free time, Mingzi enjoys dancing, playing music, hiking, cooking, and trying to out-smart her way-too-smart cat Mocha Xu.

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