Rick Bogren

Lane Foil joined the LSU AgCenter Department of Entomology in 1980 with a specific mission: to study horse flies.

Foil subsequently spent his career studying insect vectors as disease carriers and their economic costs. He started with horse flies as a vector of diseases — anaplasmosis in cattle and equine infectious anemia, or “swamp fever,” in horses. “Cattlemen wanted information about the transmission of the pathogens causing these diseases, so the AgCenter created a unique positon dedicated to groups of flies,” Foil said.

When he first came to the AgCenter, Foil asked experiment station director Doyle Chambers about applying for a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant. Chambers told him not to bother because the AgCenter had plenty of research funding. Foil applied anyway and got the grant. Since then, he’s obtained more than 30 competitive grants totaling approximately $7.7 million —$5 million as a principal investigator — which provided funding that facilitated studies that led to his hundreds of scientific communications including more than 150 in peer-reviewed journal articles.

Foil learned early that writing successful grant applications is important to pursuing science. One year, in fact, he was working with funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense and U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The virus that causes swamp fever is related to human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. So over time, Foil included medically important insects to his research. This led to more grant opportunities and expanded his scope of work.

Success has been based on two things, Foil said. “One is honesty. That’s something that never bites you. The other is adaptability. Providing what the employer wants and serving the needs of Louisiana producers. These define adaptability. We’re sometimes working on the shoulders of the mainstream to learn and add to our reputation.”

Since 2012, Foil has been conducting research on hemorrhagic disease in deer at the Wildlife Research Institute at the Bob R. Jones-Idlewild Research Station in Clinton, Louisiana. In 2013, he was named to the Pennington Chair for Wildlife Research, which was funded by a gift from the Irene W. and C.B. Pennington Foundation.

The research station has captive herds of white-tailed deer and red deer along with cattle and wild deer. There, Foil is focusing his research on developing solutions for problems that affect the health and abundance of Louisiana wildlife. His first wildlife project was hemorrhagic diseases in deer — the blue tongue virus and the epizootic hemorrhagic disease virus, known by its initials EHDV. The viruses are in the genus orbivirus, which can infect and replicate within a wide range of insects and mammals. The viruses Foil is studying may infect deer, cattle, sheep and goats. Because of the presence of the viruses in the U.S., cattle cannot be exported to other countries where the viruses aren’t present.

Over time, the horse fly brought Foil’s research full circle. His most recent endeavors include studying population genetics of the greenhead horse fly along the Gulf Coast. Knowing the biology of the horse fly, Foil and collaborator Claudia Husseneder have used the greenhead horse fly to measure the effects of insect populations following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. The research started with a grant from the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative and the National Science Foundation. “We know oil had an impact on the species,” Foil said. “We want to find out now if these environments are recovering.”

Foil said one of his greatest achievements was receiving the Doyle Chambers Research Award in 2006. The award, in honor of Chambers, who was director of the Louisiana Agricultural Experiment Station from 1964 to 1985 and vice chancellor of the AgCenter from 1979 to 1985, is for meritorious contributions to agriculture. Foil was recognized for a career marked by a sometimes "unconventional approach" to research that has yielded practical solutions that have been adopted across the globe.

Rick Bogren is associate editor of Louisiana Agriculture and professor in LSU AgCenter Communications.

(This article appears in the winter 2019 issue of Louisiana Agriculture.)

Lane Foil. Photo by Olivia McClure