ABOVE: © SARA GREGG
Armed with a paring knife, evolutionary biologist Genevieve Kozak often ventures into cornfields in the Northeastern US to cut open plant stalks and look for larvae of the European corn borer moth. The caterpillars burrow inside the plants to overwinter, leaving a telltale hole that signals to researchers such as Kozak which plants to open up.
If an organism has genes that cause it to enter diapause or break diapause at inappropriate times, then that population can crash.
Slicing through the stalks can be a challenge: back in 2011, “the first time I went out there, I cut my thumb,” says Kozak, then a postdoc in Erik Dopman’s lab at Tufts University, and now a professor at the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth. Once she has the plants cracked open, though, the caterpillars inside aren’t that difficult to gather. Each winter, after going through their last molt before ...
