There's an old joke circulating among entomologists about excited novices contacting them about finding a "two-headed butterfly."

Sounds like National Enquirer stuff, right?

Wrong. Just two butterflies mating.

If you see lots of Gulf Fritillaries (Agraulis vanillae) frequenting their host plant, the passionflower vine (Passiflora), you might spot a two-headed butterfly--if the angle is right.

This butterfly is a comeback butterlfy. It first appeared in California in the vicinity of San Diego in the 1870s, according to noted butterfly researcher Art Shapiro, professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis. He's been monitoring the butterflies of central California for four decades and maintains this website.

From San Diego, “it spread through Southern California in urban settings and was first recorded in the Bay Area about 1908," says Shapiro. "It became a persistent breeding resident in the East and South Bay in the 1950s and has been there since.”

We remember hearing about the butterfly in the Sacramento/Davis area in the 1960s. Shapiro says it “apparently bred in the Sacramento area and possibly in Davis in the 1960s, becoming extinct in the early 1970s, then recolonizing again throughout the area since 2000.”  Read what he wrote about them.

In our little pollinator garden in Vacaville, it's been a good year for Gulf Frits, with multiple sightings of two-headed butterflies. The following images, however, are of all same pair.

Emily Bick, recipient of ESA's student certification award

Doctoral candidate Emily Bick of the Christian Nansen lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, is the newly announced recipient of the Entomological Society of America's 2018 student certification award, which recognizes outstanding entomology students interested in the mission of the ESA certification program.

Bick is one of 19 recipients of this year's ESA's Professional and Student Awards, which recognize scientists, educators, and students who have distinguished themselves through their contributions to entomology.

The UC Davis entomologist and the other awardees will be honored at “Entomology 2018,” the joint meeting of the entomological societies of America, Canada and British Columbia, to take place Nov. 11-14 in Vancouver, B.C.

What does the does the student certification award entail? “Post college, I sat for and passed the ESA Board Certified Entomologist exam," she said. "Then, this past summer, I was flown to Denver, Co., by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to sit for the Medical Entomology Specialty Exam. At that time, I sat for an additional exam--Plant-Related Entomology Specialty. The Student Certification Award is given to a student who is a Board-Certified Entomologist who has written an essay about the importance of the Board Certification process."

Bick focuses her career on leveraging entomological knowledge to best serve people. Her career includes working in industry to develop practical solutions for invasion biology of urban forests. For her master's degree, she researched an invasive aquatic weed, the water hyacinth, and its insect biological control agent, Neochetina bruchi.

For her doctorate, she is behaviorally manipulating a pesticide-resistant insect (Lygus spp.) away from high-value horticultural crops using a push-pull strategy. “I use simulation models of ecosystems to optimize integrated pest management strategies, a technique I learned while on an American Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship working with Dr. Niels Holst out of Aarhus University in Denmark,” she said.

A native of New York City, Bick received her bachelor's degree in entomology from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., and her master's degree in entomology from UC Davis. She is a Board-Certified Entomologist, specializing in medical and plant entomology.

Bick credits a high school research program with inspiring her to study entomology. “I was in a high school science research program and chose to work on an insect repellent because I did not like mosquitoes,” Bick said. “Four years later, I was majoring in entomology at Cornell.”

The UC Davis doctoral student was a member of the 2016 UC Davis Linnaean Games Team that won the ESA national championship for expertise in answering questions about insects and entomologists. Now she and her team members have an opportunity to win another national championship: with the UC Berkeley-UC Davis team. The team, captained by Ralph Washington Jr., a graduate student at UC Berkeley and a former graduate student at UC Davis, also includes Brendon Boudinot, Zachary Griebenow and Jill Oberski, all of the Phil Ward lab. Boudinot was also a member of the 2016 national award-winning team.

Bick recently drew praise for her review of the San Francisco Playhouse production, "An Entomologist's Love Story," published in the ESA blog, Entomology Today.

The 7000-member ESA, founded in 1889 and headquartered in Annapolis, Md., is the world's largest organization serving the professional and scientific needs of entomologists and people in related disciplines. Its members are affiliated educational institutions, health agencies, private industry, and government.

Joanna Chiu

Walter Leal

Frank Zalom

More than 2000 scientists are registered to attend the meeting, to be held Sept. 2-6 in Gramado, Brazil.

UC Davis scientists delivering plenary addresses will be Frank Zalom, distinguished professor of entomology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and a past president of the Entomological Society of America (ESA); Walter Leal, distinguished professor, UC Davis Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and a past chair of the Department of Entomology and Nematology; and Joanna Chiu, associate professor and vice chair, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. More than 2000 attendees are registered.

On behalf of ESA, Zalom is co-organizing and co-chairing a joint conference with Antonio Panizzi, a past president and international delegate of the Entomological Society of Brazil. That event, to take place the day before the XXVII Congresso Brasileiro and X Congresso Latino-Americano meeting, will involve developing a “Grand Challenge Agenda for Entomology in South America.  

Zalom will speak on “The American Experience with the Grand Challenge Agenda in Entomology.” In addition, ESA president Michael Parrella, dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Idaho and a former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, will provide an update on the 2018 ESA annual meeting, set Nov. 11-14 in Vancouver, B. C. Speakers also will include the presidents of the entomological societies of Argentina, Peru and Brazil.

Leal, a native of Brazil, will present the opening lecture of the joint conference of the XXVII Brazilian Congress and X Latin American Congress of Entomology on “Insect Vectors: Science with Applications in Agriculture and Medicine,” on Sunday, Sept. 2. This will be his fourth opening lecture—a record—at the Brazilian Congresses of Entomology (2004 in Gramado; 2008 in Uberlandia; and 2014 in Goiania). As an aside, legendary entomologist Marcos Kogan previously held the record: he presented two opening lectures, one in 1983 and another in 2002. Both Leal and Kogan (professor emeritus of agricultural entomology, University of Illinois and professor emeritus, Oregon State University) were elected ESA fellows; Leal in 2009 and Kogan in 2016. Zalom received the honor in 2008.

Zalom, an integrated pest management specialist, and former director of the UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program (UC IPM) and Chiu, who specializes in molecular genetics of animal behavior, will speak on their research at the joint meeting. Zalom will deliver a plenary address on “Drosophila suzukii in the United States” on Sept. 5, and Chiu will keynote a symposium on Sept. 3; her lecture is titled  “Circadian Clock Research Applied to Agriculture and Public Health.”  She will give a second lecture: "Drosophila as an Insect Model" on Sept. 3.

The spotted wing drosophila (SWD) is a serious pest of fruit crops. Most drosophila flies feed on spoiled fruits, but SWD prefers fresh fruit (berries and soft-skinned fruits). Read more about SWD on the UC IPM website.

This is a fire beetle, genus Melanophila. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

The fire beetles?

"Fire beetles in the genus Melanophila are sensitive to smoke and heat from smoldering trees after a fire," said Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart and professor of entomology at UC Davis.  "They have a pair of pits on the body that detect heat. The beetles fly in large numbers to forest fires so they can lay their eggs in recently damaged trees.They will also crawl inside protective clothing of firefighters and bite them. Fire beetles will fly more than 50 miles to a fire."

Kimsey and animal biology major Crystal Homicz also told the crowd about smoke flies, which they described as "an odd group of platypezid flies use smoke plumes from burning trees to find mates. Swarms of 20 to 100 individuals can be seen 3 to 4 feet above the source of the smoke. They lay their eggs in burnt wood or soil near the burnt wood. Their larvae feed on burned plant parts and post-fire fungi."

Some insects can survive and thrive in extreme conditions beyond what humans could endure, they said. A sign read: "There are insects that can live in intense heat, cold, acidity or salinity, and some species are even attracted to fire. A wide variety of insects live in these extreme conditions, including flies, beetles, wasps and more."

Other signs informed the visitors of the insect peculiarities:

Heat
Many insects have a remarkable tolerance for high temperatures. No one knows how they survive and even thrive in these hot conditions. Several live at temperatures just below the boiling point of water.

• Desert Insects
  Even more extreme are the desert insects that are active in sand dunes during the hottest part of the year. Sand surface temperatures can reach 180°F, but unlike hot springs, there is no water. These hot desert insects include sand wasps and ants. No one knows how they tolerate these temperatures and if you fell onto the sand, you would get second degree burns.
  Sand Wasps
  These wasps are active in our southern deserts in June and July. Air temperatures range between 100°F and 120°F with sand temperatures much higher. They collect dead insects to feed to their larvae, spending a great deal of time flying and resting on the superheated sand.

Ice
A number of very different kinds of insects spend all or part of their lives in temperatures below freezing. Some are so adapted they cannot survive temperatures about 50°F.

• Snow Fleas
  Snow fleas belong to a family of scorpionflies called Boreidae. These are small, wingless predatory insects that feed on insects that they find on snow fields. The larvae feed in moss. They are found in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
• Snow Crickets
  Grylloblattids, commonly known as snow crickets, are a group of extremophilic insects that live on mountaintops and on the edge of glaciers. They survive by eating insects that fall onto snow fields. Prolonged exposure to temperatures above 60°F. can be fatal, so just holding them in your hands could kill them.

Toxic Chemicals
A wide range of insects tolerate or even thrive on some quite toxic materials ranging from heavy metals to insecticides. These include orchid bees, lead cable borers and drugstore beetles.

• Male orchid bees in the species Eufriesea purpurata have been found to collect large amounts of DDT used to protect people living in rural homes in Brazil from malaria mosquitoes. The male bees use the DDT to make a pheromone to attract females. They were collected several other insecticides with no observable toxic effects.
• Lead Cable Borer can drill holes in the lead that sheaths telecommunications aerial telephone cables. This allows moisture to reach the copper wires and causes them to short, ruining the cable for 15 or 20 feet.
• Drugstore Beetles feed on a wide variety of dried plant products which are normally very toxic, including tobacco, spices, like cloves, habanero peppers and even strychnine. Their name derives from the period when drugstores compounded treatments for illnesses from plant material. These beetles are also major pests for the tobacco industry.

Hot Springs 
Hot Spring Midges. One group of chironomid midges lives in hot springs with a temperature of 180°F. What's more remarkable is that in these hot conditions, there is little if any dissolved oxygen, yet the larvae do not breathe from the surface and obtain the oxygen they need from the water. One species is known from the hot spring pools of Yellowstone National Park.

Salt/Salinity
Halophiles are animals that live in highly salty environments. They must be able to tolerate the toxic effects of sodium and other chemicals in the water and maintain their internal water balance. Additionally, many of these salty inland waters have a pH close to that of ammonia.

• Brine Flies
  Brine flies (family Ephydridae) thrive in extremely salty water. They live on the shoes of salt lakes, and lay their eggs in the water. One species lives in Mono Lake, which is three times as as salty as the ocean, and 11.6 times saltier than human blood! The adult flies live 3 to 5 days and they also can walk underwater and feed on algae. Local tribes ate the brine fly pupae.

Also during the open house, Bohart associates encouraged youngsters to participate in a family craft activity featuring  colored yarn and cutout paper beetles. Red yarn indicated fire; blue yarn, the sky, and green yarn, vegetation. In addition, entomologist Jeff Smith, who curates the butterflies and moths, showed visitors part of the collection, and UC Davis students Karissa Merritt and Sara Guevara-Plunkett staffed the live "petting zoo," which includes Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks, and tarantulas.

Next Open House on Sept. 22
The next Bohart Museum open house, themed "Crafty Insects," is set from 1 to 4 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 22 at its location in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane. All open houses are free and family friendly.

"We will be having a two-way museum," said Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator.  "We will be displaying crafty--think cunning--insects and we are going to ask people to bring insect crafts that they have made, so all those folks who do felted, knitted, carved, sculpted crafters can share. Any and all hand-made, flea-shaped tea cozies are welcomed!"

The Bohart Museum houses a global collection of nearly eight million specimens. It is also the home of the seventh largest insect collection in North America, and the California Insect Survey, a storehouse of the insect biodiversity.  In addition to the petting zoo, the museum features a year-around gift shop, which is stocked with T-shirts, sweatshirts, books, jewelry, posters, insect-collecting equipment and insect-themed candy.

The Bohart Museum's regular hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. It is closed to the public on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and on major holidays. Admission is free.  More information on the Bohart Museum is available on the website or by contacting (530) 752-0493 or emailing bmuseum@ucdavis.edu