ARS Mormon Cricket Research Featured in Web Video 

In cooperation with the National Geographic Channel, NPARL has posted a video clip from the channel's daily news program featuring ARS Research Ecologist Greg Sword and his Mormon cricket tracking research team. The video, which originally aired July 23 on National Geographic Today, discusses the pest tracking project conducted in Colorado this past summer by Sword and his collaborators, Dr. Pat Lorch of the University of North Carolina, and Dr. Darryl Gwynne of the University of Toronto at Mississauga. Also participating was NPARL Biological Science Technician Laura Senior. The segment includes footage of researchers "tagging" individual insects with tiny radio transmitters, relocating them, and recording data on their movements using GPS. A flightless insect, the Mormon cricket is known to be capable of traveling up to a mile a day, although a particularly hardy individual tracked by the team traveled significantly further across rugged mountainous terrain. The researchers studied three different bands of Mormon crickets, with millions of insects in each band, as they moved across northwestern Colorado near Dinosaur National Monument. Researchers hope to ultimately use the information collected to develop mathematical models for predicting band movement so that producers and other affected parties can target control methods where they're most needed and most effective.

Additional article featured in ARS Magazine: Tiny Transmitters Guage Cricket Movements