Elske Tielens Brings a Unique Perspective to Insect Ecology

Elske K. Tielens has a broad cultural and academic perspective that helps her connect concepts
of insect ecology, data science, and human issues. Growing up, she had always loved being
outside. Her interest in ecology was spurred by her natural curiosity about “describing the bigger
patterns of natural systems that we observe.”

Her analytical mindset also served her well when she became fascinated with data science
through the process of problem-solving. “It’s just really fun,” she said. “I’m not an artist. But
coding is another way that you can be creative.”

Tielens had a unique pathway to get to where she is now. During an elective undergraduate
course in the Netherlands, Elske was frustrated with the imprecision of identifying insects to the
family level, which could still include thousands of species. “I just ended up failing out of the
class because the insects were so discouraging, which is kind of funny in hindsight,” she said.

Elske eventually found her passion for insect ecology during her master’s degree, where she
researched how large herbivores affect the soil chemistry and water availability of plant
communities in South Africa. “When you watch a grasshopper, get to see the hearing organs on
their knees, or you watch a parasitoid actually capture and lay its eggs inside of a caterpillar and
then try to drag it off to its nest - it’s unreal,” she explained. “ It's really cool to get to see all of
these species interactions and all of this amazing diversity that exists out there in real life.”

After she discovered this passion, Tielens researched insects and community ecology in tropical
trees for her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland and continued to delve deeper into insect
ecology in many different projects.

Insects on her research radar

A lot of Tielens’s research involves using weather radar as a tool to track insects in the air. One
of these projects included tracking grasshoppers. Because grasshoppers were so dominant in this
ecosystem, she was able to overcome the challenge of knowing which species the radar was
tracking. She ended up finding that around 48 million grasshoppers were being drawn from
nearby ecosystems with plenty of vegetation and resources to a massive light source - Las
Vegas.

“And then obviously once they're there, it's really hard to leave. People are driving all over
them. Everybody is really angry and doing whatever they can to kill them. And so in that way,
you could think about it as an ecological trap,” she explained.

In the future, Tielens proposed that a next step of that study could be to quantify the
consequences of this grasshopper movement in terms of population losses.

The Insect Apocalypse

Elske’s research soon pivoted to tackle questions about the insect apocalypse, or the widespread
decline in insects on a global scale. With large-scale questions of how insect abundance changes
over space and time, it’s hard to rely solely on traditional entomological methods like trapping
insects. Instead, her research focuses on using radar data and building tools to quantify the
amount of insects in the air and analyze how these numbers have changed over time.

At the Odum School of Ecology, Tielens is researching how monarch butterflies transition from
being on the ground to flying. “We know something about long distance migration but that
component of departure and landing and transitioning from terrestrial to aerial systems is really
still an open question. And so that's where I hope to contribute knowledge to in the next couple
of years,” she explained.

Beyond Insects

Outside of her research, Tielens also loves teaching. “I really enjoy talking to students or
bouncing around ideas,” she said. While she already has broad experiences as an educator, she
would love to design courses about biodiversity or data science. Right now, she’s planning a
course about the history of cultural science, which tackles some environmental justice issues.

Elske is fascinated by the intersection of science and human issues. Although a lot of Western
scientists say that science is objective, Tielens proposes that “our human culture seeps into the
science that we do.”

“So we'll think about who gets to do science or who is in the room or who benefits from science,
all of those have historical inequities baked into it,” she explained. When considering these
issues, Tielens understands the importance of scientists acknowledging their own perspectives.

“There’s a human element shaping this research and therefore we should understand our role
there.”