Our daily experience is shaped by just a handful of senses.

These intercepted cues help us understand our surrounding environment and, for many animals, provide crucial inputs to make decisions about food sources, mates, and potential threats. Most all organisms collect data from their environment to make choices, and the field of sensory ecology aims to learn more about how organisms send, receive, and interpret sensory signals.

Many practical applications can be discovered or enhanced from a greater understanding of how organisms process sensory information, ranging from aiding human conditions to conservation biology and pest management. The latter holds opportunities that can improve pest management strategies by leveraging the target organism’s sensory system to meet management goals.

The sensory modality of choice for agricultural pest management has generally been olfaction, through the use of message-carrying chemical signals, or semiochemicals. Semiochemicals have successfully controlled many forest, orchard, and crop insects by altering insect behavior such as attracting them to traps, or repelling them from areas. These synthetically made chemical compounds can smell like sex pheromones or host plants to attract insects to traps, or send the signal that there are no suitable host plants in a treated area. Although chemical communication is one of the dominate sensory modalities for insects, applied sensory ecologists take a multimodal approach in the hopes of activating additional sensory modalities to increase treatment efficacy.

By learning more about how organisms communicate, my goal is to develop innovative solutions for agricultural and forest pest control and conservation.