Kyle Peveto, Michael Stout and Claudia Husseneder

Lane Foil, an accomplished researcher and a professor in the LSU AgCenter Department of Entomology for over four decades, died in June 2025 at the age of 76 following a brief illness.

Foil made pioneering contributions on the biology and management of pestiferous flies, including studies on their economic effects, interactions with wildlife and livestock, and importance as vectors of disease. He leaves a long list of accomplishments and a legacy of scholarship, mentorship and scientific innovation.

“He was always a man of big ideas and a visionary,” said Claudia Husseneder, a professor in the Department of Entomology and his partner. “Where there was a problem, it was his mission to build and lead the right team to look for a solution — and have some fun while doing it.”

Born in Mississippi, Foil graduated from Auburn University with a bachelor’s degree in zoology. He then worked at the Jackson (Mississippi) Zoological Park, where he encountered many exotic animals and became “locally famous” and featured in regional media outlets, according to Foil’s family, for raising a baby wallaroo for seven months.

Foil earned a master’s degree in preventive medicine from the University of Mississippi Medical Center in 1975 before receiving his doctorate in medical entomology from Mississippi State University in 1978. Hired by the AgCenter in 1980 to study horse flies, he soon expanded his research.

At the AgCenter, Foil began studying anaplasmosis in cattle and equine infectious anemia, or “swamp fever,” and helped reduce the numbers of animals suffering from those diseases worldwide. Foil studied the mosquito-borne West Nile virus as well as the connection between fleas and cat scratch fever and many other diseases linked to insects.

In the 1990s, Foil turned his attention to horn flies, which were the top economic pest for cattle, and produced several studies focused on their resistance to common insecticides and the economic impact of the flies on crossbred beef cattle in the South.

Beginning in 2012, Foil researched the bluetongue virus and the epizootic hemorrhagic disease virus, which is known by its initials EHDV, in deer at the Wildlife Research Institute at the AgCenter Bob R. Jones-Idlewild Research Station in Clinton. In 2013, he was named to the Pennington Chair for Wildlife Research.

Foil captivated students with stories of research in Africa and South America. A favorite tale included Foil escaping Africanized bees by jumping into piranha-infested waters, Husseneder said.

“Science was fun for him, which is not mutually exclusive with a rigorous approach to science and holding himself and his team to high standards,” she said. “Fun in figuring things out and finding solutions for interesting issues — that was driving him. He lived and breathed science and never retired from doing what he loved.”

Foil loved fishing in the estuaries along the Louisiana coast. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 deeply affected Foil, leading him and Husseneder to use Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative and National Science Foundation grants to study the greenhead horse fly, which they used as a bioindicator of marsh health. The horse fly is native to salt marshes, and its larvae grow in the marsh sediment and depend on small soil organisms for food.

“For over a decade, we were roaming the marshes sampling horse flies, other insects and soil invertebrates, using biodiversity, population genetics and food web analyses to show the impact of the oil spill and the recovery of the greenhead horse fly and other insect bioindicator species and their food web,” Husseneder said.

One of Foil’s proudest late-career accomplishments was his work on sand flies and transmission and management of leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease. Along with his students, Foil demonstrated the efficacy of feed-through systemic control of sand flies, an approach for reducing transmission of leishmaniasis by delivering insecticides to sand fly larvae that feed on the feces of treated rodents and to sand fly adults that feed on infected rodents that act as reservoirs of the Leishmanial parasite. This approach was recently demonstrated to be effective at an epidemiologically relevant, spatial scale in the Middle East.

He received four U.S. patents for vaccines, including two for animal vaccines, and wrote more than 170 articles for journals. In 2006, Foil received the AgCenter’s Doyle Chambers Research Award for meritorious contributions to agriculture. The committee awarding the honor cited his “unconventional approach” to research and noted that it yielded practical solutions that were adopted worldwide.

Foil was devoted to his research and mentoring young scientists, his colleagues said, and in the months before he passed away, he could be found taking specimens for his work and planning new research projects.

Kyle Peveto is the editor of Louisiana Agriculture. Michael Stout is head of the LSU Department of Entomology and is the associate director of the Louisiana Agricultural Experiment Station, and Claudia Husseneder is the Paul K. Adams Professor of Urban Entomology.

Lane Foil counts flies while conducting research. Photo by Claudia Husseneder

Lane Foil fishes in the Gulf. Photo by Claudia Husseneder

Lane Foil poses with a redfish. Foil “enjoyed the simple things in life: fishing, hunting and cooking in good company. Louisiana was his chosen home; the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean were his favorite playgrounds,” said partner and colleague Claudia Husseneder. Photo by Claudia Husseneder

Lane Foil in his lab in 2019. Photo by Olivia McClure