Tobie Blanchard

What started in Nathan Lord’s backyard has led him around the world. Lord, an entomologist and director of the Louisiana State Arthropod Museum, said he was always collecting and sorting insects as a child growing up in Georgia, a fascination he said he had the good fortune to never outgrow.

“I always liked insects and beetles. I liked classifying them in some way,” Lord said.

“I used my mom’s jewelry box, and I would sort insects I found in there by color, by their size.”

Lord was also a talented musician. He played with the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra and statewide bands. He debated whether to pursue a career in music or insects. A self-guided entomology course in high school started to solidify his passion. Lord majored in entomology at the University of Georgia and kept his love for music alive as a member of university’s marching band.

It was at the University of Georgia where he realized his interest in classifying insects was taxonomy and where he discovered he could travel the world doing what he had loved doing as a child.

“I got to go to Bolivia for fieldwork, and I was like OK, this is it,” he said.

Lord said he spent a lot of his Ph.D. program abroad and rattled off a list of diverse countries where he conducted research: Costa Rica, Madagascar, Panama, Brazil, Rwanda, Australia, New Zealand, China, Vietnam and all over Europe.

“Some were expeditions in the remotest parts of the jungle collecting insects for weeks, and the idea there is to either grow collections or discover and describe new species,” he said.

In his travels, he has encountered political unrest (and had to convince a local government he was a scientist and not a spy), a lemur trapped in his cabin, caimans in his shower, and he has received what he called the field biologist’s badge of courage — a botfly buried under his skin.

After a postdoctoral position at Brigham Young University, Lord taught at Georgia College & State University for a few years before joining the faculty of the LSU Department of Entomology, where the director position for the arthropod museum suited Lord’s skills and knowledge.

The museum houses the state’s collection of arthropods, which number more than one million specimens. The collection serves as a resource for the state of Louisiana and a research tool for the department’s faculty and students.

“It’s our library of insects,” Lord said. “We can compare insects, and lots of parish agents use our identification expertise and the collection as the resource.”

The collection also is used for outreach purposes. The museum offers tours, and parts of the collection are used at educational events for the public.

“We can educate the public about what we do and push back that creepy-crawly bias,” he said.

Lord’s research lab focuses on beetles and their visual systems.

“What has always fascinated me about beetles is that they are the most diverse organism on the planet,” he said. “One out of every five living things on the planet is a beetle.”

Lord is particularly interested in jewel beetles and the evolution of color within that family of insects. He said most insects tend to be brown and small, but he is looking at what happens when you have this radiation of diversity in color and whether they rely on color to find one another or if they are displaying something like “don’t eat me.”

The destructive emerald ash borer is one of the jewel beetles. Lord said understanding color and vision could help control them.

“We are looking at the genes in the eye to figure out what they see because there are strategies we can employ to disrupt how they see or disrupt what colors they show,” he said.

Lord also mentors graduate and undergraduate students in his lab, showing them they can also travel the world and collect bugs for a living.

“I still feel like I have stolen every paycheck,” he joked. “Who is going to find the loophole here and correct the accounting errors that I get paid to do what I would do anyway to be a dork on the weekend?”

Lord is in the early stages of developing a collaborative project with several departments on campus including the Department of Textiles, Apparel Merchandising and Design and the College of Art and Design to create an exhibit on color and insects.

He has plans to guest-lecture in a design class and have students create garments using jewel beetle wings.

“We all work in color in different ways,” he said.

Tobie Blanchard is director of LSU AgCenter Communications and director of Communications for the LSU College of Agriculture.

(This article appears in the spring 2020 issue of Louisiana Agriculture magazine.)

Nathan Lord, assistant professor in the Department of Entomology, at the British Museum of Natural History in London in October 2018. Lord received a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study color and vision in jewel beetles. Photo by Devon Lord

Nathan Lord, LSU AgCenter entomologist, conducting research in Akagera National Park in Rwanda.