Speaker
Description
The Spotted-Winged Drosophila is an invasive pest that causes millions of dollars of damage to crops in Oregon as well as other places around the world. (Unlike its close relative, the model organism D. melanogaster, this pest feeds on fresh fruit.) While several insecticides are being used to mitigate this damage, there is evidence of decreased efficacy to some due to resistance evolution. In this talk, I will discuss a collaborative project with geneticists and agricultural scientists to identify the genetic basis of resistance and incorporate it into a stage-structured eco-evolutionary model with pulsed selection events. We use this model to identify risk factors and evolutionary rescue patterns during single fruiting seasons as well as long term population trajectories.