It’s hardly uncommon for kids to spend summer days catching and observing the behaviours of frogs and insects. Dr. Kevin Judge has made his career out of it.
The 2023 Sherrill Brown Distinguished Research Award recipient says his interest in the tiny creatures began in his graduate studies, when he was assisting a fellow master’s student on researching the mating habits of bullfrogs in Algonquin Park.
“The frogs were putting all their effort into their song, creating this beautiful noise all night. We were out in a canoe from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. under the Milky Way and the northern lights, with dozens and dozens of singing bullfrogs. It was magical,” says the associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences.
He studied lab-contained fall field crickets while pursuing his PhD, but has since swapped the lab for the natural habitats of the insects he’s studying. Currently, he’s researching hump-winged grigs (genus Cyphoderris) and their sexually cannibalistic mating habits. Unlike other species like praying mantises or black widow spiders, female hump-winged grigs do not kill their mates. Instead, they injure them by chewing on their hind wings and drinking their blood. The males, who don’t use their hind wings to fly, live out the rest of their natural lives relatively unaffected.
“The neat thing about this study system is that you can tell when males have mated because their wings are damaged. We can look at a population and see if the mated males have something in common,” explains Dr. Judge. “Are they all really big? Or is it some more subtle difference in body shape? So we can study these different attributes year after year after year.”
In order to study the hump-winged grigs, Dr. Judge has travelled to Kamloops, BC in the past. Since 2018, he’s been observing them in William Switzer Provincial Park near Hinton during the summer months. He brings along student research assistants, and his Distinguished Research Award provided him with the funds to pay them for their work.
“It’s students who actually make stuff happen. I get data flowing in that I can analyze without having to sit for hours photographing and landmarking,” says Dr. Judge. “I really get a kick out of seeing them get excited about the research and about the natural world.”
His research is ongoing, as he’s looking at variations in sexual selection over time, which requires years of observation in the hump-winged grig population.
“Selection occurs over time and geography. If we find that some years, sexual selection is stronger than others, then we can look at temperature records, forest fire records, smoke records, precipitation records, all sorts of things, and see if those environmental variables correlate with the strength of sexual selection.”
Dr. Judge is also looking at ways to expand the sample size of his research. He’s planning to work with the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI), which has taken annual samples across the province for the past decade to accurately track the biodiversity of species. The samples include sound recordings, which are primarily used for bird populations, but they also pick up the sounds of insects.
Because some insects make sounds as part of their sexual display, Dr. Judge believes measuring the intensity of sounds in the ABMI’s recordings could help him determine where species are located around Alberta, along with their population density.
“We've got a decade’s worth of data from across the province, so we've got a huge geographic scale. We can potentially answer environmental variation kinds of questions much more easily.”
In the meantime, he also uses his research as a tool to engage students.
“I can give the details, the behind-the-scenes information and, in some examples, show them a slide of data that one of their fellow MacEwan students collected,” says Dr. Judge. “It gives me the opportunity to bring research into the classroom – I can set up experiments in almost any class, and expose every student to a meaningful research experience.”