I can barely hear Esther Ngumbi over the roar of greenhouse fans as she shows me around her rooftop laboratory in Morrill Hall. The benches are full of tomato plants, and the tomatoes don’t look good. Half of the plants are submerged in bins of water.
I can barely hear Esther Ngumbi over the roar of greenhouse fans as she shows me around her rooftop laboratory in Morrill Hall. The benches are full of tomato plants, and the tomatoes don’t look good. Half of the plants are submerged in bins of water. Their leaves are yellow and withering. Some of the dying tomatoes have flowered. I see one or two baby tomatoes on a couple of spindly plants.
This isn’t the only torture inflicted on the tomatoes. Someone has tied little baggies to their stems. Inside the bags, fat green caterpillars are chowing down on the tomato leaves.
Entomology professor Ngumbi has questions — lots of them — and this is how she’s set out to answer some of them. She is purposely flooding the tomatoes to see how they might respond to flooded conditions in farmers’ fields — a scenario that is becoming more common as a result of climate change.
Read more at: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Photo Credit: Fred Zwicky
