Photo of the rusty-patched bumble bee in Minnesota (2016). Photo by Sarah Foltz Jordan, courtesy of The Xerces Society.

That's the sound of success.

It finally happened. The beleaguered rusty-patched bumble bee, Bombus affinis, is now listed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as an endangered species, the first bee in the continental United States to be listed under the Endangered Species Act.

So many folks helped spearhead this project. Bumble bee expert Robbin Thorp, distinguished emeritus professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, and co-author of Bumble Bees of North America: An Identification Guide (Princeton University) helped sound the alarm.

Thorp co-authored a 2010 petition seeking an endangered status for Bombus affinis. The Xerces Society of Invertebrate Conservation, along with Thorp and others, submitted the petition to the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2013. In 2015, agency officials agreed to consider it. In 2016, they proposed protection. Then on Jan. 10, 2017, the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the rusty-patched bumble bee as an endangered species.  (See Xerces press release.)

Other key players in making this all happen included natural history photographer/filmmaker Clay Bolt and his friends at the Day's Edge Productions, which created the award-winning film, A Ghost in the Making: Searching for the Rusty Patched Bumble Bee with support from the Xerces Society and others. The result: nearly 200,000 persons signed a petition seeking endangered status for the bee.

The rusty-patched bumble bee was once found in 28 states in the eastern and upper midwest United States, along with the District of Columbia and two Canadian provinces. Since the late 1990s, however, its population has declined by nearly 90 percent, according to Sarina Jepsen, director of endangered species for the Xerces Society.

"The rusty patched bumble bee is threatened with extinction," Jepsen wrote in the petition. "Possible causes of its decline include pathogens, habitat loss or degradation, pesticide use, and climate change. Reduced genetic diversity, which could be a result of declining, isolated populations caused by any of the aforementioned factors, likely also threatens this species with extinction. Furthermore, existing regulations are wholly inadequate to protect this species."

Jepsen described bumble bees as "iconic pollinators that contribute to our food security and the healthy functioning of our ecosystems."

Enter Clay Bolt who set out to find, photograph and document the critically imperiled bumble bee. He moved from state to state, habitat to habitat, museum to museum, meeting with scientists and conservationists.  Finally, he found the living breathing rusty-patched bumble bee in the University of Wisconsin arboretum. You can see his excitement and learn about his incredible journey in the amazing Ghost in the Making.

Bolt related that he first became aware of the plight of the rusty-patched bumble bee while looking at specimens in the collection at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. "There was a stuffed passenger pigeon in the same room, frozen in time, but no longer among us in nature," he told us. "It was once the most numerous bird on the planet and then it was no more. This has always haunted me. I decided then that I had to do everything in my power to attempt to bring more attention to this beautiful little bee before it went the same way."

With friends from Day's Edge Productions and the Xerces Society, Bolt made the film about the bee, helped develop the petition, and spoke on Capitol Hill and other high-profile events to spotlight its plight. "Through all of this, I kept thinking back to seeing this amazing little animal in the field," Bolt said. "Watching it fly. Witnessing it do what it had been doing for thousands of years. It had no idea that its fate was in our hands."

"I am just so encouraged and grateful for the public's outcry in support of this species," Bolt said. "This was an effort that would have never been possible without so many people working together to see it through. I am grateful that my images played even a small part in this historic occasion. These are the moments that make all of the hours of work and worry worthwhile."

One observation in Ghost in the Making particularly resonates: "We spend so much time and effort making life better for ourselves, the least we can do is make life possible for this bee." The film advocates that we all do our part:  provide flowers, a safe place to nest, and a pesticide-free environment.

How many other bumble bees should be listed as endangered? "That's difficult to answer, mainly due to a lack of good information," said Thorp.  "Most of our bumble bee species seem to be doing well according to our most recent assessments.  But at least one eastern cuckoo bumble bee may be declining because its host bumble bees have declined.  About a quarter of our bumble bees may be at risk, but we need more information.  One that used to be common here in the Central Valley, Bombus sonorus, basically disappeared from our area about a dozen years ago, but it is doing well in the southern part of its range in southern California and Arizona."

Meanwhile the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is reviewing three other species of bees for possible inclusion as endangered. They include Franklin's bumble bee, the western bumble bee and the yellow-banded bumble bee.

Thorp, who has been monitoring Franklin's bumble bee, Bombus franklini, since 1998 (See Dec. 12 Bug Squad), hasn't seen the bumble bee in 10 years within its five-county range of southern Oregon and northern California. He doesn't want to say the "E" word--extinct. Not yet. He thinks this may be the year he'll find it.

This week, however, is a cause for celebration. The rusty-patched bumble bee is now an endangered species, in danger of extinction, and we can now begin the process to protect it and recover it.

Christian Nansen will speak Jan. 18 at the UC Davis Community Book Project. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

Devoted to research, teaching and public service, he'll speak next week on “Urban Food Production in the Digital Age—Local Empowerment and Sustainability” as part of the UC Davis Community Book Project, which focuses on award-winning writer, activist and academic Raj Patel's work, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.

Nansen, an agricutural entomologist with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, will deliver his presentation from 12 noon to 1 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 18 in the Memorial Union's Garrison Room, UC Davis campus.

Sustainable pest management solutions in agricultural systems is a key component of Nansen's research, and he and his team focus on deployment of drones and imaging systems to optimize stress detection of pest outbreaks. In his leisure time, he is converting his back and front yards in Davis "into an urban farming system."

In his Jan. 18 seminar, Nansen will cite several important reasons why urban and suburban citizens "should increase their level of self-sufficiency and resilience when it comes to food production."

In many respects, Nansen is a citizen of the world.

Born and educated in Denmark, Nansen received his master's degree in biology from the University of Copenhagen in 1995 and his doctorate in zoology from the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Denmark in 2000. He accepted positions in Portugal, Benin, United States, UK and Australia before joining the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology in January 2015 as an assistant professor who focuses on insect ecology and remote sensing. His international experience also includes being an international exchange student at the University of Lisbon, Portugal and a visiting professor at Northwest A&F University, Yangling, China.

As part of his undergraduate studies, Nansen took time off to travel to Brazil to write a book about sustainable agriculture in rainforest areas. “In this process," he related, "I learned about the potential of honey bees as both pollinators of crops but also as ‘promoters' more broadly of sustainable agricultural development."

Christian Nansen wrote his master thesis on honey bees. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

For his doctorate, his interest turned to the larger grain borer, a serious pest of stored maize and dried cassava roots. He wrote his dissertation on “The Spatial Distribution and Potential Hosts of the Larger Grain Borer, Prostephanus truncatus (Horn) (Coleoptera: Bostrichidae), in a forest in Benin, West Africa.” His research involved stored product insect ecology, field trapping with pheromone traps, experimental work on pheromone production, vegetation analysis, satellite image interpretation, laboratory infestation of potential breeding substrates, and histological studies.

Nansen recalled that his childhood exposures to international scientists played a major role in his choice of a career. His father, a professor in veterinary parasitology, entertained many colleagues in the family home. “And my mother cooked the food! This is probably the main reasons why I enjoy both cooking and why my career has been so international.”

“Even though Denmark is a very small country (5 million people),” Nansen said, “it has been at the forefront of agricultural research and production for many decades. And growing up, my father took me on field trips and exposed me to farming systems.” In fact, young Christian earned his weekly allowance in the chicken business: he sold eggs to neighbors.

In an earlier interview, he expressed delight at seeing a “steadily growing appreciation for the origin and quality of the food we eat," noting that "today, in the 21st century, the technologies deployed in modern agriculture are so advanced and similar to the cutting-edge technologies in other fields. Those technologies require skill sets beyond what most people may be aware of. Use of drones, remote sensing, GIS models, mathematical models of weather, crop physiology and soil dynamics, models to optimize input requirements and minimize economic risks, phone apps to optimize applications of agro-chemicals – these are all skill sets and approaches we are using as part of studying food production systems and developing innovative and reliable tools to be used within the agricultural sector.”

On Thursday, Jan. 19, the day after the UC Davis Community Book Project presentation, Nansen will give a seminar on  "Droplets of Evolutionary Biology: Theoretical Modeling of Resistance Evolution to Insecticides" from 4:10 to 5:30 p.m.  in 100 Hunt Hall as part of the UC Davis Evolution and Ecology winter-quarter seminars.

He is also coordinating the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology's winter seminars. As part of those seminars, he'll speak Wednesday, March 1 from 4:10 to 5 p.m. on "Reflectance Profiling as a Tool to Study Insects and Other Objects" in Room 122, Briggs Hall.

All the presentations are free and open to the public.

It is not a good time to be a butterfly.

Especially if you're a monarch butterfly that eclosed on Jan. 5 in cold and rainy Vacaville, Calif. while all--or most--of your counterparts are overwintering along coastal California or in central Mexico. You don't even count; scientists and citizen scientists have already counted the overwintering monarch population and you're not there.

They do not know you exist.

You're nestled inside an indoor meshed butterfly habitat on a kitchen counter.  Outside, a storm brews, not unlike the nearby coffee pot gurgling away. Inside, fingers of warmth comfort you. You sip a mixture of honey and water, and then orange juice. You sample the raspberries and blueberries. At night you perch on a rosemary branch. You wake up to the sounds of National Public Radio and the coffee pot gurgling. People come and go and look at you. "What are you doing here?" You ignore them.

You are alone. Your parents met and mated sometime in November. Your 11 siblings and cousins all eclosed on the last of the tropical milkweed, leaving you with basically nothing. You are the last one.  A mid-life chrysalis if there ever was one. And now a maverick in the making. It's too cold and rainy to fly.

And then one of those humans comes by with a silkscreened garden flag and lifts you gently out of your zippered habitat. You  eagerly investigate your new territory. You see a male monarch and a honey bee looking back at you. Life imitating art, or art imitating life?

Bruce Hammock

He marveled at how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly and said that "science is full of surprises." One of the surprises: his basic research on insects led to a drug for blocking hypertension and neuropathic pain.

Now add Alzheimer's to that list.

This week Hammock announced that a drug developed in his lab yields hope for the prevention of Alzheimer's, a severe and chronic psychiatric disease that affects more than 350 million people worldwide.

Researchers at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan China, used the drug developed at UC Davis to show that the neurofibrillary pathology of an Alzheimer's disease-related protein could be dramatically reduced. Their work was published in December in the Journal of Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

“They further demonstrated the mechanism of action of the UC Davis drug in blocking the oxidative stress-driven phosphorylation events associated with Alzheimer's disease,” Hammock said. The UC Davis drug stabilizes natural anti-inflammatory mediators by inhibiting an enzyme called soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH) discovered at UC Davis and recently spotlighted in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institutes of Health's PubMed.

“I was thrilled to see this paper on tau phosphorylation from Huazhong University shows that our drug could block a key event and a key enzyme called GSK-3 beta thought critical in the development of Alzheimer's disease,” said Hammock, who holds a joint appointment in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“We were planning to do this study, but having another laboratory do it with our compound was even better,” he said. “Since our publication last year in PNAS that showed UC Davis soluble epoxide hydrolase inhibitors both prevented and reversed depression, we have been excited about trying to block the development of Alzheimer's disease.”

The PNAS paper, “Gene Deficiency and Pharmacological Inhibition of Soluble Epoxide Hydrolase Confers Resilience to Repeated Social Defeat Stress,” was co-authored by a 13-member research team led by Hammock and Kenji Hashimoto of Chiba University Center's Division of Clinical Neuroscience, Japan. They found that sEH plays a key role in the pathophysiology of depression, and that epoxy fatty acids, their mimics, as well as sEH inhibitors could be potential therapeutic or prophylactic drugs for depression and several other disorders of the central nervous system. Co-authors of the paper included Hammock lab researchers Christophe Morisseau, Jun Yang and Karen Wagner. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health, funded the research.

Hammock credited several UC Davis colleagues for their work leading to the publications. Research from the labs of Liang Zhang and Qing Li at the University of Hawaii--Qing is a former UC Davis doctoral student--pointed out some of the mechanisms involved in cognitive decline which associate professor Aldrin Gomes of the UC Davis Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior and Fawaz Haj of the UC Davis Department of Nutrition “have shown to be blocked by the natural metabolites stabilized by the UC Davis drugs,” Hammock said.

One of the Hammock lab drugs is moving toward human clinical trials for neuropathic pain through a Davis-based company, EicOsis, LLC, and the financial support of the Blueprint Program through NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Hammock founded the company to develop inhibitors to the soluble epoxide hydrolase, a key regulatory enzyme involved in the metabolism of fatty acids, to treat unmet medical needs in human and animals.

“The clinical back-up candidate at EicOsis penetrates the blood brain barrier and should be a perfect compound to test if this class of chemistry can prevent cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease,” Hammock said.

Meanwhile, I'm still thinking about that seminar, "From Butterflies to Blood Pressure and Beyond."

The "Beyond?"

Alzheimer's, a cruel disease characterized by progressive memory loss, language problems and unpredictable behavior issues.