Urban Entomology Needs a Paradigm Shift

Considering that pests of structural habitats are distasteful to many entomologists and were largely ignored by most entomology departments until just a few decades ago, the successful creation of a formal academic niche dedicated to their study has been an impressive accomplishment and a boon to the pest control industry. In recent years, there has been the gradual (and inevitable) departure of an older generation of high-profile leaders that came of age in the great flowering of the field in the 1980s, boosting concerns that urban entomology may no longer be sustaining itself at its past levels of contribution to society. How true is this?

Certainly, there is still a firm academic base to nurture the next generation. Do a quick Google search for “university urban entomology programs,” defining “program” as at least one faculty member with an active research focus on structural or medical pests (rather than urban landscapes or apiculture). Despite several departments paying lip service to the importance of urban entomology while contributing very little tangible support for it, you’ll find at least 16 U.S. universities that are firmly represented (all appearing within the first five pages of results), ranging from a few powerhouse institutions that have long dominated the field to laboratories managed by a single individual and his or her graduate students.

Similarly, the number of research articles on urban pests – the standard measure of productivity for this community – continues, at least for the moment, unabated. As an over half-century member of the Entomological Society of America, I regularly search its journals for publications in the urban entomology field (as well as at least a dozen or so additional journals from other publishers) and find it just as difficult to keep up with the tide of recent advances as I did 40 years ago. It’s hardly a rigorous empirical survey of output, but if there is a diminution in overall research activity, it is not immediately apparent.

I regularly search its journals for publications in the urban entomology field (as well as at least a dozen or so additional journals from other publishers) and find it just as difficult to keep up with the tide of recent advances as I did 40 years ago. It’s hardly a rigorous empirical survey of output, but if there is a diminution in overall research activity, it is not immediately apparent.

On the other hand, it’s hard to find any member of the academic guild involved in the study of life on the organismal level who is not justifiably concerned about the future sustainability of their particular field. Three clear, worrisome trends in higher education are responsible. The first is a sharp and persistent decline in the number of Americans going to college, accelerated by the pandemic but down by nearly 3 million over the last decade. Reasons have been widely discussed and include falling birthrates, rising tuition costs, and a greater public skepticism of the need for education past high school. All indications are that declining enrollment will continue and that, society-wide, there will be a smaller supply of U.S. citizens with degrees.

With many campuses struggling to fill seats – and government spending on research and extension also diminishing – the second trend is inevitable. Higher education has reacted to diminishing revenues like any other business, and the cooperative extension programs that have been a traditional source of support for academic outreach to the public (including the pest control industry) have been particularly hard hit, with fewer tenure-track extension faculty, more nine-month and split appointments, and more multistate responsibilities. It is no secret that extension, with its economic benefit frankly difficult to quantify, has not been particularly popular with university administrators in recent years.

This, of course, segues into the third trend. Driven by the same budgetary constraints that have resulted in several university entomology departments losing their independence and being combined into multidisciplinary departments with other fields, the careers of academic faculty are increasingly dependent on the size of the grants they bring in. As a specialty that historically has had an almost exclusively applied focus, this puts urban entomologists at a conspicuous disadvantage with colleagues in other fields that compete for government funding with basic research focused on broader and more fundamental scientific questions. In the drying-up pools of academic resources, those at the top of the research status food chain (often with an increasingly molecular approach in biological disciplines) are starving out the less prestigious programs beneath them that may, ironically, more directly support the needs and interests of the taxpaying public.

© credit | Al Greene

It’s a bleak prognosis and emphasizes the continual necessity for lobbying by the pest management community for meaningful urban entomological program support by their elected officials. And although the major players in the industry have been generous with financial contributions to urban entomology programs for many years, it goes without saying that the most effective way to promote the field is to sponsor an endowed university position dedicated to research directly relevant to the structural pest control trade. For those who can afford to do so, nothing even comes close to deploying support dollars in that fashion.

But there is another aspect to this challenge that needs to be embraced by those in academia who are instructing the next generation of urban entomological talent. Ever since Walter Ebeling legitimized the concept in the 1970s of a distinctive field dedicated to the study of arthropods affecting people and their property, urban entomology has self-identified as a subset of what used to be called “economic entomology,” i.e. the science supporting the process (and by extension, the industry) of pest control. And yet, as several practitioners in addition to myself have advocated for many years, the time to transcend this insular outlook is long overdue. There is absolutely nothing wrong with biology in the service of practical problem-solving (indeed, it is essential for human welfare), but in modern academic society, applied studies are considered to be an ancillary, not primary, raison d’être of any given scholarly pursuit.

Higher education has reacted to diminishing revenues like any other business, and the cooperative extension programs that have been a traditional source of support for academic outreach to the public have been particularly hard hit, with fewer tenure-track extension faculty, more nine-month and split appointments, and more multistate responsibilities.

Shifting the paradigm to representing the entomology of human-made structures as a basic scientific discipline with the comprehensive analysis of the “indoor biome” as its theme – and concentrating on such intrinsic questions as the ecological/physiological/behavioral antecedents for synanthropy and the environmental drivers of ongoing evolutionary change of synanthropic species – is simply a recognition that the field has matured to the point where it can compete with adjacent academic programs at the most expansive levels of inquiry.

There is nothing in this enhanced approach that signals an abandonment either of applied, practical research or the recognition that the pest control industry is the field’s most critical client. But as a strategic adjustment of how the discipline’s purpose is portrayed within the broader academic community, it would be a meaningful step to ensuring its continued endurance and prosperity.

The author is an entomologist and the former national IPM coordinator for the General Services Administration’s Public Building Service in Washington, D.C.