Insects of Inspiration

Future scientists explore corn earworms and potential for research careers

By Shana Hutchins
 

For the past three years, thousands of students from across Texas and the South have been gaining first-hand insight into scientific research, courtesy of a common agricultural pest, the corn earworm.

The nation’s latest experts on the insect — elementary and middle school students from public schools in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arkansas — are participants in the Future Scientists Student Outreach Initiative, a collaborative project sponsored by the United States Department of Agriculture/Agricultural Research Service/Southern Plains Area (USDA/ARS/SPA) and the Texas A&M University Center for Mathematics and Science Education (CMSE).

Using hands-on, inquiry-based activities such as the corn earworm life cycle, the popular project helps introduce actual USDA research into local schools and communities as it helps to inspire the next generation of research scientists.

“The challenge is to make learning relevant, and this initiative achieves that because it is based on cutting edge USDA/ARS research,” explains the CMSE’s Dr. Craig Wilson, co-principal investigator and project director. “Our goal is to encourage students to stay interested in science and also get excited about science.”

Corn earworms, also known as tomato fruit worms or cotton bollworms, generally live, eat and breed inside corn husks during a relatively short life cycle lasting about one month. For precisely this reason, Wilson says, they make the perfect specimen for introduction into middle school science classrooms, where students and teachers can easily follow their complete progression from eggs to larvae to pupae to moths.

According to Dr. Timothy P. Scott, CMSE director, the initiative specifically targets students in grades 5-8 because research indicates that middle school is the critical point when they typically lose interest in science.

“Today the United States is the breadbasket of the world, but if we don’t retain or rekindle interest in agricultural science in some way, we may not be able to hold on to that heritage,” he adds. “As a nation, we’re facing a critical shortage of agricultural scientists.”

Although the project to study corn earworms actually began about 13 years ago in Weslaco, former USDA/ARS/SPA Area Director Dr. Charles A. Onstad explains it wasn’t adapted for introduction into the classroom until about six years ago at the suggestion of Dr. Juan D. Lopez Jr., a research entomologist with the ARS in College Station.

"There are about 2,400 scientists now in the Agricultural Research Service,” Onstad notes. “Many are senior scientists. We need to instill in students the interest and ability in science — any kind of science — so that they go on to college and continue the work we’ve started.”

For more than a decade, the ARS has earmarked funds on a yearly basis to help finance the project, which Scott says enables students and their teachers to experience science in tangible ways as they develop skills applicable to far more than agricultural research.

"Often it’s hard for students to understand scientific processes, from the steps that are involved to why they occur,” says Andrea Giraldo, a fifth-grade science teacher at Johnson Elementary School in Bryan. “With the corn earworm’s short life cycle, you can start at whatever stage you want — pupa, moth, etcetera — and see changes, giving the students a much better understanding of science. I’m planning to repeat this activity every year.”