News

As we enter the holiday season, many are wondering how best to keep safe while visiting family and friends during the ongoing pandemic. Juliet Morrison ’03, member of the Board of Trustees and assistant professor in the microbiology and plant pathology department at University of California Riverside, spoke with the New York Times about practical masking tips, the efficacy of vaccines, and what the future might hold with respect to COVID prevention and care.

“When animals are misguided by evolved behavioural cues to preferentially make mistakes, they are caught in an evolutionary trap,” write Associate Professor of Biology Bruce Robertson, Devin C. Fraleigh ’18, and Jackson Barratt Heitmann ’18 in a newly published scientific paper. “Aquatic insects rely heavily on polarized light cues to locate bodies of water necessary for oviposition and mating. However, where artificial objects (e.g. asphalt, buildings) are at least as effective at polarizing light as natural water bodies, aquatic insects may instead prefer to oviposit on those surfaces where their eggs fail to hatch.”

Published in Animal Behavior, their paper “Ultraviolet polarized light pollution and evolutionary traps for aquatic insects” surveyed the natural and artificial environment to understand the properties of objects that can polarize natural and artificial sources of UV light. They conducted a field experiment to test the importance of UV polarized light in guiding habitat selection behaviour in six families of aquatic insects. The results highlight a quantitatively new type of ecological light pollution capable of creating evolutionary traps for polarotactic insects at night, or even during the day.