{"id":117007,"date":"2016-07-27T09:10:31","date_gmt":"2016-07-27T13:10:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?post_type=school-college-post&p=117007"},"modified":"2016-09-16T09:23:33","modified_gmt":"2016-09-16T13:23:33","slug":"a-walk-in-the-woods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2016\/07\/a-walk-in-the-woods\/","title":{"rendered":"A Walk in the Woods"},"content":{"rendered":"

Junior ecology and evolutionary biology student Nick Russo<\/strong> bounded easily across a flowing river by walking atop a fallen tree. He used one hand to hold onto the branches for balance and tucked a composition notebook and jewelers headset under his other arm.<\/p>\n

Once on solid ground, Russo pried off a branch from a hemlock tree to reveal the reason he goes out into the field four days a week. Nestled into the base of the hemlock needles were several clusters of white, web-like sacs.<\/p>\n

A few hundred yards past the stream, Russo arrived at the first observation site he set up in UConn Forest. Tied to four of the branches were hot pink ties that look like thick ribbon. Nick threw his jewelers headset over his eyes and closely examined the pink flagging, counting how many hemlock woolly adelgid had hatched from their egg sacs and crawled out. The amount varied based on the tree: Some had none, others four or five, and some even had around twenty crawlers, or bugs in the nymph stage. The flagging helps him return to this site again to track their activity.<\/p>\n

Hemlock woolly adelgid is an invasive insect that came to the U.S. from Japan in the 1950s when a landscaping company in Virginia ordered Japanese Hemlock trees. The bugs suck sap and nutrients out of trees.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter so many years they can kill the trees,\u201d Russo explained. \u201cWhen infestations get really bad, eventually the tree won\u2019t be able to produce new growth, and then they\u2019ll lose all their needles and die.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hemlock woolly adelgid has destroyed over 60 percent of hemlock forests in the Eastern U.S. Close to 25 percent of hemlocks across the U.S. are infested already.<\/p>\n

Russo\u2019s research is set to be published in the academic journal Environmental Entomology <\/em>this fall. His work on these invasive insects will help scientists and the public understand whether the bugs could spread further north into other, untouched forests.<\/p>\n

Morgan Tingley, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and Russo\u2019s research advisor, said, \u201cI imagine it\u2019s pretty rare to have undergrads first-author publications on projects of their own creation, particularly long before their senior theses.\u201d<\/p>\n

An Early Naturalist<\/strong><\/p>\n

At a young age, Russo would sit at the breakfast table studying a field guide while eating his cereal. He would memorize facts and look at the pictures.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d think, \u2018Oh wouldn\u2019t that be so cool to see a black-throated green warbler?\u2019 From there, I just ended up remembering things,\u201d Russo said.<\/p>\n

When he was ten, Russo started venturing to the forest with his sister to catch frogs and toads, which led him to exploring by himself. He started with catching salamanders, then learning all the plant names, and eventually identifying birds.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like bird songs a lot,\u201d Russo said. \u201cI\u2019ve always liked hearing their songs and then being able to identify them. There are so many more species out there that you wouldn\u2019t notice unless you pay attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russo came to UConn knowing he wanted to do ecology research. In his two years, Russo has been a founding member of the UConn Birding Club, a member of the genetic engineering team, and a student researcher.<\/p>\n

It was a genetic engineering conference in Boston that led him to think about what plagues trees in Eastern North America.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remembered hemlock woolly adelgid because we had some in my neighborhood,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen I was in high school, I had wanted to figure out what it was. I didn\u2019t think much more about it until I came [to UConn].\u201d<\/p>\n

At first, he did not think that catching birds and counting adelgid crawlers would amount to much. But Tingley saw a lot of value in Russo\u2019s research because, he says, no one else is doing this kind of work. Now, Russo is the recipient of both the Holster and Udall Scholarships.<\/p>\n

Spreading an Invader<\/strong><\/p>\n

To figure out if birds are the cause of the spread, Russo looks at how active the crawlers are on the trees, while also tracking how many of the bugs are found on the birds. He catches birds and extracts adelgids from their feathers, to determine whether birds are spreading the bugs to other forests.<\/p>\n

He wants to know whether migratory birds are more likely than non-migratory birds to carry the bugs from forest to forest. If migratory birds are the culprits, then this invasive species could spread to forests father north that are not currently infested.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere aren\u2019t as many crawlers out during the breeding season,\u201d Russo explained. \u201cIt\u2019s like a perfect intersection when the dispersible stage of adelgid is just running rampant and when birds are flying north.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deep in the UConn Forest, Russo uncovered a tree particularly populated with what an untrained eye would likely mistake for a small grain of cracked pepper. He counted more than twenty crawlers, noting using cardinal directions which branches he found them on. Then he tied a piece of flagging to a tree that was not infested, to serve as a control. From this summer\u2019s work, he\u2019s hoping to find that crawler activity is high around the same time that birds begin to migrate.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think [this work] suits me well because I like to go to a bunch of different places, and I like being outside,\u201d Russo said. \u201cI have a lot of control over the work that I do too, since the success of a project depends on how I handle it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russo plans to pursue research post-graduation, and hopes to become a professor one day.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know how many questions I\u2019ll have left after my undergrad experience!\u201d he joked.<\/p>\n

Birds chirped, wind poured through the canopy, and the sun speckled the river Russo crossed. Sidetracked briefly by a toad in the bed of leaves, Russo noted excitedly that he\u2019d recently seen a coyote and a box turtle nearby.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne thing that\u2019s great about being out here is that there is so much great wildlife besides birds,\u201d Russo said.<\/p>\n

Russo will attend a conference for Udall recipients in Tucson, Arizona next week, where he\u2019ll work on an environmental case study.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis work has really taken me a lot of places,\u201d he added. \u201cIt started in high school. I was just trying to find things to do outside of school, and I\u2019ve carried that spirit to college.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nick Russo rose before dawn for weeks this summer to scour Connecticut forests for an invasive bug, the size of a peppercorn, that destroys the most robust hemlock trees. His work will help predict which forests could be next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":117008,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1858],"class_list":["post-117007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-11 15:32:08","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117007\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/117008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117007"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=117007"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=117007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}