Landscape Ecology of Insects
The snow is slowly but surely melting and we are starting to think about the upcoming field season. Here in the Gratton Lab, we do most of our field work in agricultural settings. One crop we work in is corn. For those of you who didn’t grow up on a farm, you might not have …
Congratulations to Claudio who was recently promoted to full professor! This week we interviewed Claudio to learn a little bit more about him. When did you decide you wanted to be a professor? I was probably 8 years old. My dad was a professor. He worked in an underground lab with lasers and I thought …
There has been a lot of buzz in the lab about two papers examining the relationships between habitat diversity (at local and landscape scales) and arthropod diversity. The first paper (Bennett and Gratton 2013) examines the relationships between floral diversity and the diversity of beneficial arthropods which includes insect pollinators and predators. Ashley and Claudio …
If you noticed higher prices or fewer raspberries at your local farmer’s market this fall, you’re not alone. Wisconsin raspberries faced a new pest, Spotted Wing Drosophila (Drosophila suzukii) this year and the big question is: where is it now and will it return? Native to Southeast Asia, Spotted Wing Drosophila (SWD) is a fruit …
The Gratton Lab has a new home! We recently moved from our old location at Russell labs to a sparkling new building called the Wisconsin Energy Institute. The purpose of this move is two fold- one is to provide a space for us to use as they renovate Russell labs in the coming years and two, …