Over on the EcoIPM blog, Your Wild Life team member, Emily Meineke, has a new blog post describing her research on scale insects, small pest insects that spend most of their lives sucking the juices from willow oaks. Emily, a PhD student working with Steve Frank and Rob Dunn, is the lead author of new research published today in the journal PLOS ONE – their research showed that urban warming causes scale insects living on willow oak to become more abundant in the hot parts of the cities. Check out her post, embedded below:

 

As Emily notes near the end of her post, we’re just beginning to understand the ecological story of scale insects living on street trees in cities. Emily and post-doc Elsa Youngsteadt (who’s studying another species of scale living on street trees in East Coast cities) recently worked with multi-media artist Lynn Fellman to illustrate a bit more of this complicated story. Enjoy!