Insect Adaptability Keeps Minnesota Couple Hopping

By Nancy Torner

MARSHALL, Minnesota, April 30, 2003 (ENS) - When Lee French and his wife, Joann, started their research business, neighbors worried the operation would bring doom to agriculture in southwest Minnesota.

The couple worried it might wipe out their savings.

Twenty-five years later, demand for their product is as strong as ever, and neighbors no longer bother about what goes on inside the walls of the laboratory, even if they do not fully understand the French Agriculture Research operation.

"People can come out and look at it, but the basics, they still do not understand," French said. "Even my father, who lives next to me and is in my lab every day, still just doesn't comprehend what we do."

French and his wife rear insects, an occupation that causes most people to say "oh ick" when they first hear about it, French said.

Minnesota farmland near Lamberton (Photo courtesy U. Minnesota SWROC)

French, an entomologist, also teaches environmental science at Southwest State University in Marshall and is an adjunct assistant professor for the University of Minnesota. His wife holds a degree in biology and chemistry.

"When we first started, the neighbors were very worried that I would release [insects] and they would be just totally destroyed," French said. "The other thing, people thought that if we had a tornado come in and it destroyed our building, our insects would get out and kill all the plants, all the cropland in Minnesota.

"But what we have in our building at any one time is no more than a farmer would have in 10 acres of one field."

Most of the couple's insects go to seed and chemical companies across the country and in Europe for use in controlled studies, French said. The couple sells all stages of insects, from eggs and larvae to adult beetles. Demand is highest for eggs, although pet stores go for the other stages to feed reptiles. A single order can range from 1,000 to 30 million eggs.

"In order to make research understandable, or meaningful, we have to place approximately the same number of insects on each plant," French said. "By having a constant source of particular insects, researchers all over the world can decide if that insecticide is indeed the best, or that BT corn is good for the control of whatever insect."

Western corn rootworm larva (Photo courtesy USDA)

"It's environmentally friendly in all respects," French said.

Some European countries, which reject genetically modified seeds, have grown some of the lines for the last five years. Now, some U.S. seed companies are showing interest, he said.

When the couple started their business, they reared only the western corn rootworm beetle, which French studied as a graduate student, and only as an experiment to see if they could actually make a living from insects.

"Trying to get money to build was impossible," French said. "I went to local banks; I went to banks in the cities. [They said], 'You're going to make money off of insects? That's not going to happen.'"

So, the couple scraped together what money they could to pour a concrete floor and put up a prefab building as their laboratory. To their surprise, they made a profit, Joann Stepanek French said. So, they added another room and another insect.

"We kept going until we ran out of room," she said.

The laboratory now houses 10 different types of insects in their various stages of development, all needing their own special environment.

Keeping the business going means constantly refreshing the supply of insects by collecting them in the wild because they adapt quickly to artificial diets fed to them in the laboratory, French said.

"With the European corn bore, in 15 to 20 generations, they don't even know what a corn plant is anymore," French said. "You can put a million insects on one corn plant and they won't eat it."

An adult western corn rootworm searches for pollen on corn silk. (Photo by Tom Hlavaty courtesy USDA)

"Insects have the ability to adapt to anything we do," French said.

For instance, researchers in Illinois have discovered that some corn eating insects now lay their eggs in soybean fields in fall because they have learned from steady rotations of corn and soybeans that this is where corn will sprout in spring.

The western corn rootworm has changed its biology four times since French began studying the insect 30 years ago. For example, where once their eggs hatched every year, some now lay dormant for a year or more and hatch with the next corn rotation.

"A way of controlling these things is to rotate everything that you do. You rotate insecticides; you rotate your rotations of crops," French said. "There will always be some there, but it confuses them so much that they do not build up a genetic population that will do everything in one year."

Some new biotechnology corn designed to fend off rootworms is available for planting this year, but French predicts insects will adapt to this new plant within five years.

"That's the nature of the beast," he said.