Amman, Jordan – Zeid Sinokrot was an unemployed engineer in 2012 when he decided to join the family business, growing dates on a farm outside Jericho. But his father's date palms began dying one by one, consumed from the inside by insects that were impossible to see until the trees began to keel over. Four years later, his father sold the farm. "I knew I wanted to find a solution to the problem," Sinokrot told Al Jazeera. "Trees were falling, and farmers were afraid."

Twenty years ago, Stephen Goldson thought he had beaten the Argentine stem weevil, an invasive insect that was devastating New Zealand's pastures. Goldson, an entomologist, had scoured the South American countryside and come up with an efficient weevil killer: a parasitoid wasp that at first killed up to 90% of the weevils. Now, the weevil has made a comeback and an examination of decades worth of data on its abundance over years has revealed that the weevil has outevolved its parasite, which produces asexually. Now, Goldson and his colleagues are studying weevil DNA to learn the secret of this comeback.