Eric Fan

Period 4B
22 October 2015
Me: So what made you decide to pursue a career in entomology and study ants?
Dr. Lapolla: Well, I guess I had always been interested in insects even as a kid, and so when I
think back on it, although I didnt necessarily think about this as a career in entomology, but I
think back on it from early on as an elementary school kid, I would collect insects and
particularly I was interested in collecting ant colonies. I remember dragging my mom out to go
find queen ants and start ant colonies. So when I think back on it that sort of started early, so
there has always been that underlying interest. When I started college as an undergraduate, I
didnt necessarily know I wanted to go into entomology. I was interested in biology and a very
kind of broad sense in ecology and things like that, but I didnt know anything about systematics
and more sort of evolutionary biology type fields. I just didnt know much about that as an
undergrad. So in terms of what ultimately made me decide to go into, to pursue entomology after
undergraduate, it would have been, I had the opportunity, as a sophomore I guess, as an
undergrad sophomore/junior, I guess it was that summer, um to do an internship at the Academy
of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and I got to work in the entomology department there, and
got to work with the curators in that museum, do some field trips with them, got to work at the
collections that are there at the museum, and those experiences are ultimately led me to want to
do entomology for graduate school. And ultimately I wanted to work on ants. So its always been
an interest that Ive had and Ive pursued it more vigorously once I had that experience at the
museum and I decided that thats what I wanted to go into.
Me: What kind of field trips did you take?
Dr. Lapolla: as an undergrad, we did some local stuff, so we went around to different parts of
Pennsylvania and New Jersey but by that first year I had done a trip to the great Smokey
mountains in South Carolina with Dan Otte who was one of the long time curators of the
museum. We went along with some other scientists who were from outside the museum and that
made a big impression on me, and ultimately, I guess that was after I was already in grad school.
So I did some field trips like that and those were really important to me and just listening to the
different curators, they would have lunch together and I would be able to join them, from all the
different departments and I would hear the stories and the things they were working on, things
that were really interesting, so thats what led me to pursue that in grad school
Me: Cool. So the next question is, in what ways do you hope that studying ants will help humans
advance as a species?
Dr. Lapolla: Well, I think theres a few different ways to approach that. So in general, I think a
lot of the work that I do doesnt necessarily have a direct correlation with helping humans,
whatever that means, I mean theres a part of me that philosophically feels that part of the reason
we do science is that we do science because there are interesting questions to ask and be
answered in the natural world. One of our unique attributes is that we can pursue these kinds of

questions, we can ask questions about the universe of whats out there, whats around, how does
it function, what does it do for a living, all those questions right, so part of it is that I think that
there are two aspects of science. One is to go out and discover things about the natural world,
about the universe, whatever it might be, that part of our goal as scientists, and I think that that is
one of our fundamental goals, that we should let our curiosity about and after the world and
natural phenomenon, and drive what were interested in, because I think that that makes the best
science and leads to the most interesting discoveries and things like that. So I would put myself
firmly in that camp, that the reason I do the things I do is because I want to know about some
aspect, in this case ants, but it could be anything, of other things that share the planet with us and
what they do for a living and how they got here, what sort of, where they fit into the big tree of
life, all of those kinds of questions. But of course, there is the more practical side, which can
merge, so I think that my philosophical basis is that Im interested in pursuing things because im
curious about these little things we call ants and what they do and why they have become such
important members of the animal communities and all the species that are out there and finding
these new species and putting them in an evolutionary context. But all that being said, obviously
there are some applied aspects that can emerge from that work too. And so in my own direct
work as a systematist, Ive see various aspects have an applied function. For example, the tawny
crazy ant, or rasbery crazy ant, is a perfect example of this. It was an invasive species that
arrived in the U.S. in 2001 and started spreading, but no one could put a name to it. That might
seem almost trivial, but not being able to know what it is makes a number of big limitations, such
as not being able to figure out where it was from originally and then you cant identify natural
predators or parasites or whatever it might be, or you cant understand the conditions for which
that species evolved and that might have some implications for control. So thats a really good
example, where my basic work in taxonomy, dealing with the genus Nylanderia, which again,
arose from my own curiosity about this genus, knowing that it needed a bunch of taxonomic
work. There was no applied reason to go into this work, or I didnt approach it from that
perspective, but of course its had a lot of applied function because there are several species that
are invasive and get around the world and can cause economic impacts. So its had an applied
use in that function, in that way. So I guess in those ways thats our helping humans, providing
identification tools, providing information about where the origin of these species is from. I think
particularly in the taxonomic work that I do, taxonomy has two functions, one is sort of basic just
to increase knowledge, to learn about all the species that we share the planet with, to know that
theyre there, because you have to know that somethings there before you can do anything else
with it. But then from that information theres that applied side to it, where people want to be
able to identify things. Maybe theyre invasive, maybe they need to go somewhere and establish
nature reserves, whatever it might be and they want to do an inventory on what lives there. Those
sort of tools become important. There are sort of two aspects of that, so yeah, thats what I would
say.
Me: Alright. And what are some major topics in entomology currently and why do you think that
they are so big right now?
Dr. Lapolla: So, entomology is a really broad discipline. Im a systematist, I focus on the
systematic side of entomology, so im interested in taxonomy and phylogenetic relations with

species and things like that. But as an overall discipline, there are some big topics depending on
which sub discipline you are talking about. So within systematics, some of the big questions, one
of them of course, I would argue, is basic species discovery is still a really important topic in
entomology, simply because, there are still hundreds of thousands, probably millions of species
waiting to be discovered on the planet, and so even that basic inventory of figuring out what
makes the whole group of insects, theres still a lot of work to do. So I think that certainly, one of
the big topics within my area, and that sort of relates to a lot of other aspects of entomology. But
I mean, if you were to pick some current topics, like in all sort of fields, one of the things that
insects have been increasingly used for is as models for climate change. Theres been a lot of
interest in how insect populations may react to climate change, what sort of things may happen,
so I think thats been a big topic in entomology overall. And in certain terms, a hot topic of
whats going on. So I would say thats one of the big things that are driving a lot of different labs
that are looking at entomology. But again, its a little hard to answer that because entomology is
such a broad field, it really depends on your sub discipline of where youre operating.
Entomologys one of these fields in science where it has definitely a strong applied aspect,
theres the whole control of insects, aspect of entomology. If you were to look at the control of
insects, certainly the use of pesticides and how thats affecting the overall insect population,
particularly of non-target insects. Thats gotten a lot of press. If you look at all the information on
pollinator declines and things like that, thats all related to this whole pesticide use issue. So it
really does depend a little bit on the sub-discipline, but that would be some of the topics that I
would phrase as important ones for entomology.
Me: Building on the control aspect, we know that the fire ants have a big impact in the U.S. and
what do you think the future will be for them and how will we deal with them in the future?
Dr. Lapolla: So ants are an interesting group from a sort of non-native, invasive point of view. So
of course, there are about 13,000 described species of ants, species that we know about right
now. About a hundred of those rise to the status about what you would call invasive species,
where theyre outside their native range and theyre impacting either humans directly or having
ecological economic impacts, or some combination thereof. So its actually a relatively small,
and fire ants of course fall into that category, so its a relatively small set of ants overall when
you consider the entirety of how many species there are. But I think like everything, in terms of,
with fire ants, the more recent Nylanderia fulva, the tawny crazy ant, one of the things that has
become apparent is that things such as climate change are certainly going to be impacting how
these populations move around, whether or not they grow, and I dont think we really know
whats going to be the response of those. I mean, theres lots of models out there in general,
because many invasive species of ants come from the tropics, which makes sense because ants in
general are a tropical group. Most models suggests that a lot of these ranges will expand,
including fire ants. As climates get warmer, it will become more favorable. But we dont entirely
know because its an experiment weve never run before, so we dont entirely know whats going
to happen. With fire ants, whats interesting now, is that they appear to be being displaced by the
tawny crazy ant. If that will continue or not is very unclear. But certainly, theyre not going
anywhere. Fire ants are just going to be a fact of life in the Southeastern United States forever,
theyre never going to be eliminated, its quite obvious that were never going to be able to do

that. And I think thats true for a lot of invasive species. Thats why a lot of people who study
invasive species in general, not just ants, have started to change their approach to this, that rather
than have elimination be the goal, its become more about accommodation, how you manage
landscapes with these invasive species because in many cases you see many plants too, its
become pretty obvious that theres no way we are ever going to get rid of them. They are here
now and they are going to stay here. And that is true for things like fire ants as well. I think its
important to note that with all these invasive species and ants and whatever, we dont entirely
know what all the effects are yet, because these populations are adapting and changing overtime,
and theyre effects are therefore adapting and changing overtime. Of course the native species are
adapting and changing in response to them too, so we dont always know how this all this is
going to play out. And I would say that this is true for fire ants as well as any invasive ant
species. So climate change is going to be a big thing over the next century. That is going to be
the big thing that is going to impact all invasive species in ways that are probably not completely
clear but theyre here to stay.
Me: Alright. How effective do you think is the use of ants as biological pest control, to control
other invasive species or pests?
Dr. Lapolla: Well, fire ants are a good example of this. If by biological control, you mean, like
using parasitoids and things like that as a way to control fire ants, the results are kind of unclear
whats happened with those, how successful those have been or not. So like with parasitoid flies,
there is a whole group of flies which have been attempted in being used to control fire ants. And
its actually not clear what effect theyve had, if any. And one of the things were not entirely
clear of, with that example, is have those parasitoids moved to native species? We dont know, no
one is looking to see if they are. What we do know is that their effect on fire ants has been fairly
minimal. That being said, biocontrol is a whole discipline of pest control and has had really good
success stories as well. So I think in terms of controlling things like fire ants or some other
invasive ant species, we havent had a huge amount of success. But biocontrol as a thing
within controlling insects has had many success stories. But we havent necessarily seen that
with many ant species. And fire ants would be the best example, because im not sure of how
many other invasive ant species biocontrol has been attempted with, but its certainly been
attempted on fire ants, and I think you would have to say that its kind of equivocal, its unclear
how much of an effect its had.
Me Alright. And what do you think we can learn from studying symbiotic relationships between
ants and other species, like with their fungi, aphids, and mealybugs?
Dr. Lapolla: so, people have been studying the ant-fungus relationship for a long time with attine
ants. So with the attines that grow fungus, they farm fungus. People now talk about ant
agriculture. So, ant agriculture can be broken up into two categories, where you have the fungus
growing ones, and that system has been fairly well studied, we know quite a bit about how that
system works. And theres a bunch of things that emerge from that. One is that the big, big
picture of looking at any symbiotic relationship, is the fact that classic evolutionary theory
contends that individuals should tend to interact with other individuals in very selfish and
conflict driven ways, meaning that symbiotic relationships should be rather rare because

individuals are acting in selfish ways. The goal of any individual is to propagate itself and
sometimes that will come in direct conflict with being cooperative to another individual. So
symbioses are interesting because they challenge that tenant because it seeming presents a
challenge to the idea to classic evolutionary theory that conflict and selfishness should be the
main drives of how individuals face the world. In the big picture, studying fungus-ant
relationships is a way to look at that, to see if thats not happening, if its not being driven by
conflict and selfishness, how is it working? Thats been a big focus of the fungus-growing ant
relationships. How does that work? How does this system maintain itself? The same thing could
be said for the other part of ant agriculture, which involves aphids and more importantly,
mealybugs, where you get relationships where, in the case of Acropyga, which is one of the
groups I work on, where they are obligate with the mealybugs. They have to live with the
mealybugs and the mealybugs have to live with them and they are essentially using the
mealybugs as a kind of cattle. The same questions can be asked, how do you get a system where
you seemingly have this symbiotic relationship between these two groups, how did they get
around the central tenant of conflict and selfishness that are driving the system. And so ant
agriculture provides a test to that big question, how you get these symbiotic relationships and
how you study that. From an agricultural perspective overall, there are not many organisms
outside of ants and humans that engage in what you could call agriculture. So one of the things,
going back to one of your first questions, how it will help humans, the study of ant agriculture
does have lessons, because ants, both the fungus growers and the herding ants, the ones that are
using mealybugs and aphids, have some of the same exact problems that human farmers have in
terms of pest resistance and pests in general, and pathogens, and all these things that could affect
human agriculture could just as much affect ant agriculture. But the difference is that ants have
been doing this for 40-50 million years. Humans have only been doing it for less than 10,000, so
they have potential lessons, and obviously theres some really big differences between the way
humans do things and the way ants do things, but there could be some parallels there in terms of
how theyve dealt with some of these same problems. So on a more practical side, theres that.
So I think the overall question of symbiotic relationships with ants is that it involves these big
you can ask as a model system, because why arent they in conflict and how did these
mutualisms evolve? What do they tell us about how mutualisms evolve and how do they become
stable. So both of these types of ants can potentially answer that. So the whole aspect that you
can ask the applied questions, that what do these symbiotic relationships have to tell us about
human agriculture? What parallels can we draw with the caveat, obviously they are different
systems, but there could be parallels because they face some of the same pressures that human
agriculture faces.
Me: Alright, so that is about it. Thank you for your time.

In my opinion, the interview went well. I got some valuable information concerning my
topic out of it from my mentor, Dr. Lapolla. In my next interview, I will try to ask more specific
questions about my topic, such as ones concerning ants in the genus Acropyga. The most difficult
part about planning the interview is coming up with good questions to ask and how to transition
between them. Executing the interview itself was fairly easy in comparison.