Dr. Doug Landis waded into a soybean field in Michigan’s Kellogg Biological Station LTER Site. Bending down in the September heat, he carefully turned over leaf after leaf. After a few seconds he stopped, “Here they are!”

I crouched down to my heels, bringing my face close to the rough underside of the leaf. Dr. Landis pointed to a few tiny yellow specks, so small it took me a moment to actually notice them. “That’s a mother and her young,” he explained: soybean aphids.

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