Emily Bick, assistant professor and extension specialist in the Department of Entomology, recently received an international date palm innovation award from Saudi Arabia’s National Center for Palms and Dates. She accepted the award in person in late November during the International Dates Conference and Exhibition held at King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where she gave the plenary address.

The award recognizes the Bick Lab’s work on the Insect Eavesdropper, a system that involves clipping microphones onto plants in order to listen to insects as they feed on the leaves, bore down the stalk, and feed on the rootzone. While Bick has not yet worked directly on date palms, plans are underway for a project based at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, where researchers want to use the Insect Eavesdropper to study date palms’ primary pest, the red palm weevil. In the past, Bick’s team has worked on coconut hispine beetle on coconut palms with promising results, with support from the Maldives Space Research Organization.

So far the Insect Eavesdropper has been tested on 27 insect species in 17 cropping systems with 30 academic and government partners. The Bick Lab is releasing a new version with a free-for-academic-use license, build plans, and a python package to interpret the data.