A hotel ballroom. Hungry guests arriving in 30 minutes. And something has moved in that definitely wasn’t on the guest list. In this high-energy, hands-on challenge, you’ll team up with two real pest management experts to crack the case before time runs out. Armed with clues, evidence, and your best detective instincts, you’ll hunt the room for signs of infestation, identify the culprits, and build a treatment plan just like the pros do. Think you can tell a bed bug trail from a rodent runway? Prove it. The team with the sharpest eyes and the best strategy wins, but every participant walks away with something bigger: a totally new perspective on one of the most high-tech, high-stakes, and surprisingly cool careers out there. Game on.​​

Presenters:

Edna Alfaro-Inocente, The Scientist Who Hunts Bugs for a Living
Edna is a Board-Certified Entomologist with a master’s degree who has spent her career doing things most people don’t even know are jobs, like tracking disease-carrying insects, testing whether bugs have developed resistance to pesticides, and using DNA sequencing to identify what’s actually crawling around where it shouldn’t be. She’s Sprague Pest Solutions Regional Entomologist and has worked at the Illinois Natural History Survey, which means she’s equally at home in the field, the lab, and the classroom. She’s licensed to apply pesticides in six states, knows her way around a PCR machine, and can identify a pest from evidence most people would walk right past. If today’s challenge has you stumped, she’s exactly the expert you want in the room.​​

Lindsey Marker, Bug Detective, Dog Handler & Boss
Lindsey started her pest management career on the routes, literally doing the work, and rose all the way to Regional Manager at Sprague Pest Solutions, overseeing 34 counties across Utah and Nevada. Oh, and somewhere along the way she became a certified bed bug detection dog handler, which is exactly as cool as it sounds. In 2025 she was named a Women in Pest Management Impact Award winner, which tracks for someone who built her career from the ground up on pure hustle. When she’s not running one of the largest pest management territories in the West, she’s mentoring inmates at a maximum-security prison or camping with her two teenage daughters. She’s here today because she knows this industry can take you further than you’d ever expect.

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