[Purdue Spotlight] Youth Movement

In a tiny, unassuming office in an out-of-the-way corner of Smith Hall on the campus of Purdue University, entomologist Dr. Grzegorz Buczkowski does what generations of young scientists have done before him — painstakingly document and interpret hundreds of lab tests on cockroaches, ants and other insects, attempting to better understand the biology, behavior and control of household pests. Although only 35 years old, he’s come a long way from his days as a youth growing up in Brzeg, Poland, a small town in the southwestern part of the country, thousands of miles and a world away from the Purdue University campus.

Buczkowski came to the United States in 1989 when his father accepted a position as a visiting scientist at North Carolina State University (NCSU). “I grew up in an academic environment where everyone seemed to have a Ph.D., so being surrounded by scientists seemed very normal to me,” Buczkowski said. After graduating from high school and earning a degree in Zoology from NCSU in 1995, Buczkowski (nicknamed “Grzesiek”) took a few years off before going to graduate school. During that time he worked for Rhône-Poulenc, where he performed some of the early work on fipronil bait for fire ant control. “We looked at mortality. We looked at trophallaxis. That’s where I really got interested in entomology.”

And he couldn’t have been in a better place to pursue his passion for insects. Dr. Coby Schal’s NCSU lab was virtually in his backyard. While impressed with Buczkowski’s interest in entomology, Schal wasn’t convinced the young scientist had what it took to succeed academically. “I am rather embarrassed to admit that I had some early trepidation about Grzesiek as ‘graduate-student material’ based on his undergraduate grades and performance on standardized graduate school tests,” Schal said. However, those initial reservations quickly disappeared as Schal observed the young graduate student in his laboratory. “Grzesiek was a ball of fire in the lab and in the field, had incredible energy and ‘smarts’; and he went on to complete a superb Ph.D. dissertation with (Professor) Jules Silverman, who had just joined NCSU,” Schal said. “His Ph.D. project was an exciting combination of behavioral ecology, population genetics and chemical ecology directed at understanding colony organization of Argentine ants.”

Buczkowski, who currently heads the Industrial Affiliates Program at Purdue University’s Center for Urban and Industrial Pest Management, also was “a great citizen of NCSU’s entomology department,” according to Schal, where he played an active role in promoting the science of entomology and participated in several professional meetings, including the International Conference on Urban Entomology in the Czech Republic and the National Conference on Urban Entomology in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. “Grzesiek came through one of the strongest research programs in the country, so he’s been a perfect fit to lead the Industrial Affiliates Program at Purdue,” said Purdue’s Dr. Gary Bennett.

Buczkowski’s recent work focuses on a diverse range of subjects, including caste differentiation in termites, colony structure and foraging behavior in ants and termites, and insecticide transfer in cockroaches, a topic he’s particularly well-versed in, according to Schal. “When Grzesiek joined my lab, Robert Kopanic (now with SC Johnson) had just completed an exciting Ph.D. project on coprophagy (consumption of fecal material) in cockroaches,” Schal said. “He showed that cockroaches — particularly first instar nymphs — benefit tremendously from engaging in coprophagy, even to the point of not needing to forage for food. 

“Because fipronil was the first major insecticide that was effective both by ingestion and contact, Grzesiek followed-up on Bob’s work and evaluated the effects of various pathways for introducing fipronil into insects (topical, residual and oral) and the transfer of fipronil from treated (donor) to untreated (recipient) cockroaches by coprophagy, trophallaxis and necrophagy,” Schal observed. “He identified a novel mechanism of translocation involving oral secretions, and through an ingenious combination of radiotracer techniques and time-lapse video analysis, Grzesiek showed that small nymphs are ‘fatally attracted’ to the oral secretions of cockroaches that ingested fipronil. This fit beautifully with Kopanic’s observations that first instars do things differently from other life stages. Grzesiek’s research resulted in an excellent Master’s thesis from which he published three refereed publications, two in the Journal of Economic Entomology and one in Pesticide Biochemistry and Physiology.”

After a brief post-doctoral research stint at Ohio State University, Buczkowski eventually joined Purdue University, where he’s led a number of research projects, including recent work on insecticide transfer with Advion® Cockroach Gel Bait from DuPont Professional Products. “As we started to hear back from PCOs about the field performance of the product (after it was introduced),” observed Dr. Clay Scherer, global development product manager, DuPont, “we decided to study it a bit further. But we weren’t in the best position internally to evaluate the transfer phenomenon, so we asked ourselves who in the academic community could help us, and based on Grzesiek’s past work he stood out.”

In his role as director of Purdue’s Industrial Affiliates Program, as well as his personal interest in the subject, Buczkowski was more than willing to lend his expertise to the project when approached by Scherer. “Secondary kill has been illustrated both in the lab and in the field with cockroaches and other insects,” Buczkowski said, “but we wondered if you could take it a step further. Could we take dead and dying cockroaches, place them in an arena of untreated cockroaches, and have them transfer the insecticide from the donor to the untreated recipient population, resulting in tertiary kill. It’s very similar to secondary kill, but you’re taking it a step further. People hadn’t looked at that before.” The design for the series of experiments took about a month. “After we got the methods worked out we actually ran the formal experiment without too much difficulty. I ran the experiment one time (replicated seven to 10 times),” Buczkowski said. “Then I ran the same experiment again to ensure that what we saw the first time was real.”

While tertiary kill has been validated in the lab thanks to Buczkowski’s research, it has not been shown in the field, in part because too many variables are at play. “When you do this work in the lab you have a controlled environment,” he said. “In the field you don’t know how many cockroaches you’re dealing with and residents are often using a variety of over-the-counter products that would invalidate the study. It’s difficult to design a study that shows secondary or tertiary kill in the field because there are so many outside variables, but it (tertiary kill) is not just hype. These tests have been replicated and repeated in the lab several different times, so what we’ve observed is real.”

Dr. Phil Koehler, professor of entomology, University of Florida, is convinced of the benefits of both secondary and tertiary kill. “The concept of secondary kill — and now tertiary kill — is a concept that goes way back,” he said. “It’s something researchers always talked about, but research techniques have become refined enough now that you can show it in the lab.” Ultimately, however, Koehler said the pest management professional just wants to see results, regardless of how the cockroach acquires a lethal dose of the active ingredient. “It doesn’t matter to him how the active ingredient got into those roaches, he just wants them dead.”

Nonetheless, Dr. Clay Scherer, a former graduate student of Koehler’s, is pleased to have been involved in the research project. “It’s been really fun and exciting to work with Grzesiek and Purdue on this research. The scientific paper based on the research (to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Economic Entomology) will be part of the history of cockroach baits, and that’s exciting and gratifying,” he said.

Dossier: Dr. Grzegorz Buczkowski
Research Assistant Professor and Director of Industrial Affiliates Program
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind.

Education

• Bachelor’s Degree: North Carolina State University, 1995
• Master’s Degree: North Carolina State University, 2000
• Ph.D.: North Carolina State University, 2003

Hometown
Brzeg, Poland

Current Research Interests

• Use of immunomarking techniques to study nutrient distribution and foraging behavior in ants and termites.
• Spatial colony structure and foraging ecology in the black carpenter ant, Camponotus pennsylvanicus.
• Genomic investigation of caste differentiation in termites.
• Interspecific competition and nutritional ecology in the odorous house ant, Tapinoma sessile.
• Sponsored (applied) research in the lab and field on termites and ants.

Publication Credits
Environmental Entomology, Insect Molecular Biology, Insectes Sociaux, Animal Behaviour, Journal of Economic Entomology, Journal of Chemical Ecology, Molecular Ecology, Pesticide Biochemistry and Physiology, Journal of Insect Behavior and Biological Invasions.