The love life of an unknown number of mating caterpillars went up in smoke Monday after a fire broke out in a University of Nevada, Reno laboratory.
The fire started in the Howard Medical Sciences building at the northeastern portion of the campus at about 9:10 p.m., Reno Fire Department spokesman Steve Frady said Tuesday.
The automatic fire sprinklers came on and the fire was out by the time firefighters arrived to find about $3,000 damage to one wall and some containers, he said. The fire was started by a malfunctioning exhaust fan, Frady said.
The laboratory was not occupied at the time and there were no injuries or fatalities -- except for the Manduca sexta, said David Schooley, a biochemistry professor who works in the lab.
“We were raising these very large insects for research,” he said. “Manduca is Latin for 'glutton,’ and sexta means 'six,’ which comes from the six spots on their bodies (in their moth stage). These are highly voracious caterpillars.”
Anyone who has raised tomatoes probably has seen the homely, lime green caterpillar with spots that is more commonly known as the tobacco hornworm, Schooley said.
As part of his research to try to find a non-toxic method of eliminating these creatures that wreak havoc on farmers’ tobacco, tomato, potato and other crops, Schooley was breeding the adults to get more Manduca sexta to use in his tests.
“In order to get young Manduca, we needed to have a mating cage for the adults, and this mating cage was made out of Plexiglas,” he said.
Unfortunately, the exhaust fan used to ventilate air through the cage broke and the apparently the motor caught fire, burning the Plexiglas, Schooley said.
“All the mating adults in the cage were lost,” he said, adding that the incident has put his research about three weeks behind schedule.
The good news is some Manduca pupae — horned worm teenagers in that stage between larvae and adult -- were in a nearby plastic bucket and they survived.
“Several of these plastic buckets melted, but most of the Manduca pupae are OK,” Schooley said.