Little insects, big br
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Biology PhD student studies treeh
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Female treehoppers like a good pick-up line as much as the next insect. But, says Bretta Speck, treehoppers’ discerning taste in mates is not only about how good a signal sounds — treehoppers have rules about what factors into such a signal. Speck is a PhD student in UWM’s Biological Sciences department studying combinatorial signal processing in insects. In essence, she’s researching whether treehoppers can process signals with some of the same rules humans use in language. “If we’re talking about human language … there are certain rules for how we put sounds together. If I said ‘ih’ and ‘nnn,’ those sounds come together to form the syllable ‘in.’ You can start combining from there – ‘in’ plus ‘sect’ forms ‘insect’. But ‘sectin’ is not an acceptable word in English. You can go from forming syllables to words, phrases, sentences, and so on,” Speck explained. “There have been a lot of studies on the rules that birds, whales, primates, and some other mammals use to process the combinations of elements in their songs. It’s been studied in frogs too. I wanted to ask whether insects also use combinatorial rules in communication.”
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2 • IN FOCUS • October, 2020
Biological sciences PhD student Bretta Speck shows off a tiny treehopper insect. Speck studies how these insects use combinatorial signal processing to communicate. Photo courtesy of Bretta Speck.
