The western bean cutworm (Stricosta albicosta) is unusual in specializing on two very different host plants, maize and dry beans, and very little else. We recently found that in central Michigan, where maize and dry beans are both grown in fairly large quantities, adult cutworm moths almost always developed on maize, suggesting that the two crops cannot be used as mutual “natural refuges” for the purposes of managing resistance evolution.

Western bean cutworms are often infected with a pathogenic microsporidium. We are currently studying the infection dynamics of this pathogen and are sequencing its genome.