In this series, we're sitting down with Swette Center affiliated faculty to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. See the rest of the series on our Faculty Profiles page.
Read on for an interview with Rick Overson, Research Scientist for the Global Locust Initiative.
How did you become interested in food systems?
I first became interested in food systems indirectly. Starting from the time I was a small child, I was obsessed with insects—I was the kid with fistfuls of worms, catching bugs in mayo jars. I got my undergraduate degree at ASU, and that’s where I met the right mentors at the right time and realized I could go to graduate school to study bugs. So, I ended up doing my PhD here at ASU as well, studying the evolution of ant social behavior, before working on some postdocs in both insect systematics and bee and other pollinator interactions in the western United States. Most of that research was based in fundamental biology and was never applied to human challenges until seven years ago, when I was hired back to ASU by Dr. Arianne Cease to co-direct the Global Locust Initiative (GLI) with her. Working with locusts here at GLI gave me the opportunity to apply my research for the first time to study insects that are not directly harmful to humans—they don’t spread disease or sting people—but they are terribly dangerous because of their voracious appetites.
When a large locust outbreak occurs, it's basically a continental-level meteorological event formed by swarms of hundreds of millions of locusts, which can take many years of Mother Nature’s cooperation and human pesticide application to control. While these outbreaks are natural events, nobody can afford to have all their food eaten, so in many areas people are forced to choose between famine or dumping tens of thousands of liters of synthetic pesticides. These outbreaks can be particularly devastating in areas where humans rely on subsistence farming. This is the problem that we at GLI and our stakeholder network are working on solving.
Can you share a glimpse of your current research and how it applies to food systems transformation?
As a research scientist for GLI, I wear two hats: one of them is managing the research spaces we have here on campus. Down in the basement of the Life Sciences A building, we have thousands of live plague locusts from around the world, and about 3 to 5 species of them from various continents at any given time. Taking care of and maintaining those colonies is a complicated job in coordination with the DACT (Department of Animal Care and Technology). These colonies at ASU are an amazing resource that allows graduate and undergraduate students, and visiting scholars, to do important research on how these locusts work. Specifically, we’re trying to understand their biology and especially their nutritional physiology to understand what makes them tick and how they do the things they do that make them so hard to manage.
The other hat I wear at GLI is working with our network of global stakeholders. Our Global Locust Network has around 250 members now, across 40 countries. That might not sound like a lot, but that’s a decent representation of the small group of people that are working on this large problem around the world; there should be more. It includes everyone from members of farmer groups, officials at the United Nations, heads of plant protection agencies, students, researchers, social scientists, and many others who are looking to make locust management more sustainable.
What’s an innovation in food systems that you’re excited about?
Locusts present a really daunting challenge, so there’s a lot of innovation going on in the management space. One example that’s being studied right now is fungal biopesticides, which are much safer for humans and the environment than conventional pesticides. There are challenges with using them, but it’s showing promise. Our lab is also leading efforts in collaboration with partners in West Africa with USAID funding to implement strategies that modify soil nutrients and create plants that are less attractive to locusts in large, controlled field studies.
Those are some really great developments. But for me, the innovation I’m most excited about is building online digital tools for the global community. These are things that tend to be overlooked, but they’re critical from a capacity building standpoint because locusts emerge very sporadically, and it could be anywhere from one year to 60 years before a given country experiences an outbreak again. It’s really difficult to maintain the knowledge to manage something so uncertain. Currently we are working on two tools to tackle this challenge, one of which is called HopperLink. HopperLink is an online platform where people can talk to each other in a democratic, open network. Students can talk to individuals from the United Nations, and land managers can talk to scientists, all surrounding this theme of locusts and pest grasshoppers. The other tool we’re developing in its early stages is HopperWiki, which is a bank of foundational information resources that are accessible among languages, free from paywalls. The idea is to make the world’s knowledge surrounding these themes much more visible and accessible.
What’s your favorite weeknight meal?
Mashed potatoes! I grew up as a kid eating mashed potatoes from dehydrated potato flakes—they’re a little gross but I can still eat them. Now that I’m an adult though, I prefer to make real mashed potatoes, the way my grandparents used to make them. When I’m motivated to do home cooking, there’s no better comfort food than mashed potatoes with obscene amounts of cream and butter.
Bonus question: What is a locust?
On a biological level, a locust is a type of grasshopper. Here in North America, we don’t think about locusts often because we don’t have a species of true locust, but most areas of the world outside of the United States and Canada have one or more locust species. You can find locusts mentioned in the Bible, the Qu’Ran, and other ancient texts, so it’s clear that humans have been grappling with them for thousands of years. They’re a very interesting insect because, at low population levels, locusts just act like a regular grasshopper. They’re low-density, they’re cryptic, they hide, and nobody really pays attention to them. But unlike a normal grasshopper, the 20-or-so species of locusts in the world have a unique ability in that, when times of plenty come—which often occurs after sporadic rain in normally dry areas—they quickly multiply and are able to recognize that there’s now a lot of them, which causes them to go down a completely different developmental pathway. Much like a Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde switch, they suddenly change color, their brain chemistry transforms, and instead of avoiding one another they become attracted to one another. They form massive groups and begin marching across the ground in coordinated formations miles long, and if rains persist, they eventually take to the skies in massive clouds the size of Manhattan that can eat the same amount of food as tens of thousands of people.