ABOVE: © KATHY PLUNKETT PHOTOGRAPHY
It’s not easy to monitor electrical activity in an aphid. But it can be done with wire and glue. This electrical penetration graph technique involves gluing a wire onto an aphid’s back so that the insect is still able to walk around. When the animal is allowed to eat a plant conducting an electrical current, the resulting readout from the plant can provide valuable information about its feeding behavior. As an entomology master’s student at Kansas State University in the mid-2000s, Joe Louis set out to learn how to use the technique.
“He had to learn to apply the electronics and the technical side of that, which not many people have ever mastered,” says John Ruberson, who worked at Kansas State at the time and is now head of the entomology department at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL), where Louis is an associate professor. It ...
