ICE Network Fargo

Size constrains oxygen delivery capacity within but not between bumble bee castes in Bombus impatiens

Rikki Walter, Joseph. P. Rinehart, Michael E. Dillon, and Kendra. J. Greenlee Abstract Bumble bees are eusocial, with distinct worker and queen castes that vary strikingly in size and life-history. The smaller workers rely on energetically-demanding foraging flights to collect resources for rearing brood. Queens can be 3 to 4 times larger than workers, flying…

A dose of experimental hormesis: When mild stress protects and improves animal performance

Raymond Berry, III and Giancarlo López-Martínez Abstract The adaptive response characterized by a biphasic curve is known as hormesis. In a hormesis framework, exposure to low doses leads to protective and beneficial responses while exposures to high doses are damaging and detrimental. Comparative physiologists have studied hormesis for over a century, but our understanding of…

Adaptation to the abiotic environment in insects: the influence of variability on ecophysiology and evolutionary genomics

Michael E Dillon, Jeffrey D Lozier Abstract Advances in tools to gather environmental, phenotypic, and molecular data have accelerated our ability to detect abiotic drivers of variation across the genome-to-phenome spectrum in model and non-model insects. However, differences in the spatial and temporal resolution of these data sets may create gaps in our understanding of…

Fluctuating thermal regimes prevent chill injury but do not change patterns of oxidative stress in the alfalfa leafcutting bee, Megachile rotundata

Alex S Torson, George D Yocum, Joseph P Rinehart, Sean A Nash, Julia H Bowsher Abstract In insects, prolonged exposure to unseasonably low temperatures can lead to detrimental physiological effects known as chill injury. Changes to active and passive transport across epithelia during chilling likely drive the collapse of ion gradients, metabolic imbalance and potentially…

Alex Torson

Alex Torson is a Research Computational Biologist at the USDA-ARS in Fargo, North Dakota. His expertise includes transcriptomics, bioinformatics and insect physiology. Most of his current projects focus on the transcriptional regulation of diapause and cold tolerance in many economically important insects including the alfalfa leafcutting bee, Megachile rotundata. Alex says his dream project would include breaking…

George Boateng-Sarfo

George Boateng-Sarfo is a Graduate Research Assistant at North Dakota State University. In the past, George has worked as a Biomedical Research Scientist at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research and the US Naval Medical Research Unit-3, Ghana Detachment. As a member of the Next-Generation Sequencing core team, he worked on identifying pathogens that cause Acute…

Joshua Rinehart

Joshua Rinehart is a master’s student at North Dakota State University. His expertise includes DNA extractions, running QPCR, and troubleshooting in both the lab and field. He is currently working on a nesting preference experiment where he gave alfalfa bees different sized nesting cavities to see where they prefer to nest and how that effects…

Taylor Hatcher

“Pursue what you love even if it takes a lot of time, you are going to be living through those years anyway, you might as well spend them working towards the things you want and love in life.” Taylor Hatcher is an undergraduate researcher at the University of Wyoming in the Dillon Lab. Her expertise is…