My research involves insects in the family Cerambycidae, commonly called the longhorned beetles. Most of the non-entomologists I know aren't familiar with these beetles, but they are quite common, and if you see one you'll know it. The hallmark of this group is, of course, the ludicrously long antennae. Females have shorter antennae, and in some groups the antennae are unremarkable, but it's a good rule of thumb. They are beautiful insects and an important aesthetic contribution to any insect collection. They are also terribly destructive forest pests, because the larvae spend their lives boring into the wood of trees. This is convenient for us cerambycid workers because there is always money for research.

Pheromones - chemical signals used for within-species communication - are very important in this group. Over the past several years, students in the Hanks lab have discovered and described a great bounty of aggregation pheromones in the longhorned beetle subfamily Cerambycinae. These are pheromones that attract both sexes to a given area, in contrast to sex pheromones that only attract a single sex. These pheromones are strongly conserved, meaning that a few types of pheromone are produced by a great many species. Moreover, they are attractive to dozens of other species of beetles that do not produce them, and even natural enemies such as parasitoids. This is interesting from an ecological standpoint (how can they tell one species from another?), and also hints at a broad-spectrum method for controlling species of pests.

I work on this group from two different angles. In the field I test the activity of pheromones and record the response of different species of insects, whether they are target cerambycids or collateral groups like natural enemies. In the lab, I screen beetles we collect for novel pheromones and study how these chemicals are detected at the molecular level, in the hopes that we can answer some of these ecological questions and even generate novel attractants.