Speaker: Gail Langellotto, Associate Professor of Horticulture and Statewide Coordinator for the Master Gardener Program at Oregon State University

Insects are capable of highly complex courting, mating and parenting behaviors, despite having a collection of neurons in place of a brain.  Nuptial gifts, maternal care, male ornaments as honest advertisers of health and fitness, female choice and even traumatic insemination, insect sex is stranger than you could imagine.  This class may not help you better diagnose plant problems, but it may change the way you look at the natural world, for quite some time.  Note: biological terms will be used to discuss sex and mating.  This talk may, therefore, not be appropriate for young children.

Gail Langellotto has a M.S. and  Ph.D. in entomology from the University of Maryland, where she spent three years counting planthopper sperm to answer the age-old evolutionary question: 'is sperm cheap or costly?'.  To follow up her M.S. research on planthoppers, she spent the next 6 years studying cannibalism in wolf spiders in order to understand why spiders aren't better at the biological control of pests.  She's currently an Associate Professor of Horticulture and the Statewide Coordinator of the Master Gardener Program at Oregon State University.

*This program is approved for Master Gardener recertification credit.

Kevin Matteson P.h.D