Cassondra Myers, a senior biology major, was awarded an A.J. Palumbo Student Research Grant to fund her senior research project, “Comparison of Dietary Preferences in the Gypsy Moth (Lymantria dispar) between Unparasitized Larvae and Larvae that have been Parasitized by the Parasitic Wasp Glyptapantheles flavicoxis.”  She made the following statement about her work:
 
“This project is aimed to study a speculated theory that animals in the wild will alter their diets, when infected with an illness, as a form of self medication. Although this idea has primarily been studied on primates, my experiment is aimed towards gypsy moth larvae; to reveal if larvae infected with parasites would choose to eat poison hemlock over their natural diet as a way to relieve themselves of the parasites as speculated that they would do in nature.”