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Tephritid fruit fly with harmonic radar tag attached, marked with yellow fingernail polish.
Tephritidae fruit flies are a major problem for American farmers. They have an insatiable hunger for succulent fruits and vegetables, and they can easily fly or be carried by wind to their next feeding destination. The key to managing these pests is to understand their flying behaviors. Researchers from ARS’s Daniel K. Inouye U.S. Pacific Basin Agricultural Research Center in Hilo, HI, are using harmonic radar tagging, initially developed for locating avalanche victims, to study the flying patterns of these pests.
The method uses reflector tags that require no energy source of their own to bounce a signal back to a transceiver to map movement data. Though attaching harmonic radar tags to the fruit flies requires painstaking precision, the mechanism is relatively simplistic: a superelastic 4-centimeter wire is connected to a diode, or one-way current semi-conductor, with an ultraviolet-activated adhesive. Next, electrical connections between the wires and diode contacts are secured with conductive silver paint. Check out the radar tags in this video. With the ability to follow the flight patterns of this destructive pest, researchers can help farmers improve fruit fly management strategies; identify outbreak sources; and anticipate their movement, feeding, and mating patterns. Read more here.
An image created by AI depicting a cow’s rumen. Courtesy of Iowa State University.
ARS scientists in Bushland, TX, joined forces with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) experts at Iowa State University and cattle nutrition experts at Texas A&M University to address a long-standing challenge for farmers: producing more meat with less feed. To accomplish this, scientists are harnessing machine learning and GenAI to fast-track discoveries that capture the thousands of biochemical processes inside a cow’s stomach, converting feed into energy, body mass, and ultimately high-quality meat. They have identified new strategies to reduce enteric methane, a natural by-product of microbial feed digestion, resulting in more building blocks to improve meat production efficiency.
Take a Deeper Dive:
Cows have four stomach compartments, and in the largest one, microorganisms help them digest food, producing methane gas as a waste product. Reducing methane gas generation will improve meat production efficiency, but identifying and evaluating potential solutions is tricky and takes a lot of time and funding. Past studies have found that a molecule called bromoform can reduce methane generation, but there are potential safety concerns. Therefore, scientists are using this knowledge to search for other safe options that work just as well. That’s where AI comes in!
In their quest for solutions, scientists are training GenAI to identify molecules with characteristics similar to bromoform that can reduce methane gas generation in cattle while being non-toxic and safe for human consumption. It is like finding ‘a needle in a haystack,’ but scientists are confident that using GenAI can expedite this process. Using GenAI, scientists are examining thousands of tiny molecules to understand their behavior inside a cow's stomach. They are predicting which ones may help reduce gas production without toxicity and then test them in a laboratory to ensure safety before being used in animal feed. This interactive process, where the results from lab tests are fed back into the computer models, continually improves the AI model’s accuracy and speeds up the search for effective, non-toxic solutions. So far, 15 new molecules have been identified that could function similarly to bromoform but are safer, demonstrating that combining AI with laboratory research is a valuable scientific tool.
AI can accelerate the work of animal nutritionists, researchers, and the livestock industry, getting us closer to the ranchers’ goal of making agriculture more profitable and resilient.
The passionflower bee on a yellow passionflower. (Photo by Katherine Parys, ARS)
You may have heard of honey bees and bumble bees, but did you know there are roughly 4,000 species of native bees in the United States?
One interesting bee is the passionflower bee (Protandrena passiflorae). This bee forages exclusively on yellow passionflower (Passiflora lutea), a small vine native primarily to the southeastern U.S. with delicate and fragrant yellow flowers.
Researchers joke that the bee is a “pollen thief” due to its unusual and self-serving behaviors.
“The passionflower bee is really a pollen thief,” Katherine Parys, a research entomologist at the ARS Pollinator Health in Southern Crop Ecosystems Research Unit in Stoneville, MS. “The female bees take pollen from the flowers to feed their larvae but likely contribute little to actual pollination.”
To better understand this quirky bee, ARS researchers wanted to study its genetic makeup. They developed a high-quality genome, a complete set of DNA that an organism has. Want to learn more? Read "Studying A Notorious Pollen Thief".
ARS researchers in East Lansing, MI in collaboration with Michigan State University, developed a new dual-arm harvesting robot to enhance fruit harvest efficiency and cost effectiveness. The new robot demonstrated up to a 34% improvement in harvesting efficiency, compared to the single-arm robot, with great potential for further performance enhancement.
Harvesting labor is the single largest cost in production of apples and other tree fruits. This new robot design provides a commercially viable solution to automated harvesting of apples, which is critical to the long-term sustainability and global competitiveness of the U.S. apple industry.
A group of fire ants drink from a water droplet (on the left) while a few fire ants avoid the water droplet with snake venom (on the right). (Photo by Bob Vander Meer, ARS)
Snakes Vs. Ants: A Foul Fight
It seems like a strange fight, snakes versus ants. But snakes and ants have occupied the same underground environments for centuries and have become familiar with each other as neighbors typically do. The earliest snakes, some of which are ancestors of the worm-like Texas blindsnake, had to protect and defend themselves from aggressive ants. Their primary weapon? Secreting foul-smelling toxins from the base of their tails. These toxins not only act as a repellent for ants but could also paralyze and kills ants that come in contact with the secretion.
Why is this important to agriculture? These findings will help researchers study alternative tools that farmers and citizens can use to manage ant populations. Read more here.
A California condor perched on a rock in the Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona. (Getty Images).
Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) is threatening an already endangered bird species in America, the California Condor. HPAI is transmitted through the feces, oral secretions, and organs of infected animals. This means the California Condor is especially susceptible to HPAI because it is a scavenger, feeding on the carcasses of dead animals.
ARS and other federal agencies have been taking emergency action to vaccinate the California Condor for HPAI. The vaccine produces protective antibodies that reduce the risk of infection in the birds and prevents/reduces the impact of clinical disease if infected.
Over 100,000 acres of Florida’s ecosystem have been infested with an invasive plant species, Old Word climbing fern. These ferns grow up to 90 feet in length and have destroyed numerous native plant populations.
ARS partnered with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and the Australian Biological Control Laboratory (ABCL) to collect, identify, and test moth caterpillars feeding on Old World climbing fern in its natural habitat. They found that one species of snout moth, Neomusotima conspurcatalis, has been a successful deterrent of the fern.
The study helped to identify and discover new fern-eating moth species and their caterpillars, which were previously unknown to science. This knowledge is important for future outbreaks of Old World climbing fern, and will be instrumental in protecting U.S. Agriculture, forestry, and native plants populations.
Happy free-range chickens enjoying nature in the lush grass in the evening sun (Getty Image)
Corn and corn byproducts are the biggest components of poultry feed in the U.S. However, corn can be susceptible to a variety of mycotoxins, including carcinogens produced by fungi. Ingestion of mycotoxins can have disastrous effects on poultry populations, weakening the gut and leaving the poultry vulnerable to harmful bacteria. Losses due to mycotoxins are estimated at $900 million per year.
The FDA allows farmers to use corn and other feed containing mycotoxins at very low levels. However, researchers at ARS have found that even these low levels of mycotoxins in feed can be damaging to livestock, reducing production performance by 10.5% compared to unexposed birds. ARS research biologist Revathi Shanmugasundaram states, “Mycotoxin contamination of corn and feed must be reduced, and eventually eliminated, for optimal poultry health and production.”
ARS’s National Animal Germplasm Program (NAGP) collects, stores, and preserves genetic samples of various wildlife and livestock. Through the use of this program’s samples, cattle breeders have been able to restore genetic diversity in their livestock, resulting in more desirable genetic traits like greater size and higher milk production.
Angus and Holstein cattle were previously thought to have no problem with genetic diversity, but the use of pre-1997 NAGP samples in livestock breeding has proved that cows today produce less than those of yesteryear. NAGP researchers and the Livestock and Range Research Laboratory are currently studying the genomic differences between bulls born before 1997 and the current population to better understand the reasons for the higher performance levels.
Can you imagine spring without butterflies? More specifically, the black and orange winged monarch, the most iconic butterfly of all? Beyond the sadness of seeing this species fall into extinction, the effect on the North American ecosystem would be disastrous, causing a great reduction in floral diversity due to lack of pollination.
Researchers at ARS have devised a plan to preserve the monarch butterfly in the event of a mass extinction of the species. They devised the first known cryopreservation protocol for the long-term storage of monarch butterfly germplasm, specifically reproductive cells. Cryopreservation allows for these reproductive cells to be frozen and stored long term, preserving them for if and when monarch butterfly populations drop.
Cryopreservation presents a more permanent way of preserving insect germplasm and safeguards our vital pollinators from the threat of extinction, and by extension, the complete collapse of the North American ecosystem.
