University of Arizona biologist Noah Whiteman wasn’t looking for treasure in the dog park where he regularly exercised his hyper Hungarian sporting dog, Tilla, during his postdoc days at Harvard between August 2006 and January 2010. But that’s what he found when he spotted mustard-yellow flowers with bumpy leaves while following Tilla down an embankment. A naturalist at heart, Whiteman let Tilla off her leash and bent down to take a closer look at the plants. “On the lowest leaf I saw these weird mines,” Whiteman recounts, “I had bags with me for picking up dog shit and I put a ton of these leaves in them.”
Back in the lab he classified the plants as relatives of Arabidopsis, and from the mines he picked out insect larvae burrowed into the leaves. After the larvae metamorphosed, he identified the adult flies—an arduous ...
