Judith Myers
Professor Emeritus
Land and Food Systems and UBC Department of Zoology
The year 2025 marked the 50th year of monitoring cyclic tent caterpillar populations on Mandarte Island, B.C. A recent overview of this work, “Long-term population dynamics of western tent caterpillars: History, trends and causes of cycles” has been published in the Journal of Animal Ecology Volume94, Issue10, October 2025,Pages 1922-1934 and is available at https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.70104.
Through experiments and observations, we show the importance of a viral disease and fecundity change in the cyclic population dynamics of this native moth species. I continue to be interested in the biological control of invasive weeds. An overview of my career in insect ecology and biological control is available in the 2026 volume of Annual Review of Entomology, “A Lifetime of Insect Ecology” https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ento-121423-013710.