- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It is not a "pretty sight," as Ernest Hemingway might have said, to see a honey bee stuck like glue--nature's "gorilla glue?"-in the reproductive chamber of a milkweed.
It's a trap, a floral trap.
If you've never seen this, this is how it works: milkweed produces pollinia, a sticky structure or packet of pollen grains originating from a single anther (male part). During the flower's complex pollination process, the mass is transferred as a single unit and looks like a yellow wishbone dangling on a honey bee's legs or other parts of her anatomy. It's a devious way for the milkweed to force insects to help them reproduce--in exchange for the sweet nectar reward. (Orchids produce pollinia, too.)
Oh, the nectar is so enticing! Honey bees (and other insects) literally make a bee-line for the it. They buzz and bump around as they await a vacancy. The scenario almost calls for crowd control or at least traffic lights.
But it's a trap, a floral trap. Sometimes you'll see frenzied bees struggling to free themselves from the sticky nectar trough. They are not always successful. Return to the scene of the grime and you'll see insect parts or whole insects trapped in the sticky mass. Dead.
The two honey bees below experienced different fates on this narrow-leafed milkweed, Asclepias fascicularis. One managed to free her leg from the grip of the milkweed reproductive chamber and return to her colony, complete with the precious nectar--and legs intact. The other did not. The meal was her last.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
If you're a praying mantis, it's important to start the day out right by meditating, praying, and exercising.
Close your eyes and slow your breathing. Be grateful for what you have, not what you want. But it's permissible to dream big, as in a Megachile pluto instead of a Perdita minima.
Begin with the cat-camel stretch; just call it the Apis mellifera or honey bee stretch. It's great to limber up the head, thorax and abdomen and tone your muscles. You don't want to get arthritis, do you? No, didn't think so.
No treadmlll? Try balance training. Just hang upside down on that Cosmos plant and then turn parallel as if you're on the parallel bars and then flip upright. It keeps your blood flowing and your heart pumping. Repetition is good. It's all good. Do it again!
Then try some strength building with leg squats and bicep curls with those those spiked forelegs. Make sure your coxa, trochanter, femur, tibia and tarsa are flexible. They're all in this together!
Lunges? Of course! You must strengthen, sculpt, and tone your body for overall fitness. Get your head and body in position. Leap forward as if you see a bumble bee. Push-ups are good, too, as are squats, jumping jacks, eye-rolling and antennae-twitching. Also suitable for courting.
Reach-ups for upper-body strength? Definitely. Lean on that Cosmos stem for support and stretch those spiked forelegs. That's a good way to kick-start your day and tackle all your projects.
And maybe, just maybe, you'll see breakfast coming your way before you're finished with your daily morning exercise. Your prayers will be answered.
As your mama said, "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day."
Mama also told you--remember this? "Carpe diem, seize the day!"
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, PLT currently offers no tours of what it calls "a special place," but you can take a virtual tour by watching its newly released YouTube video.
Found only in California, the dogface butterfly is more prevalent at the preserve than anywhere else in the state. It is there because its larval host plant--false indigo (Amorpha californica)--is there. False indigo, a riparian shrub, thrives on the preserve among poison oak and willows and along the banks.
The Bohart Museum of Entomology, UC Davis, is closely aligned with PLT and the butterfly habitat. Naturalist Greg Kareofelas, a Bohart associate and an authority on the butterfly, serves as a volunteer tour guide. He and fellow Bohart associate Fran Keller, a UC Davis alumnus and now a professor at Folsom Lake College, created the Zerene eurydice poster offered in the Bohart gift shop. Keller also authored the 35-page children's book, The Story of the Dogface Butterfly, with photos by Kareofelas (and Keller) and illustrations by then UC Davis student Laine Bauer. The book tells the untold story of the rare and elusive butterfly, and how schoolchildren became involved in convincing the State Legislature to select it as the state insect.
When you watch the YouTube video, that's Kareofelas' net holding a dogface butterfly, which he showed to tour participants and then released. He has reared the butterfly from egg to larva to chrysalis to adult and presented programs at the Bohart Museum.
It flies high and it flies fast, Shapiro points out. "Both sexes routinely fly 15-20 feet off the ground," he writes on his website. "They dip down to visit such flowers as California Buckeye, thistles, tall blue verbena, etc. but seldom linger long."
In 2017, KVIE Public Television's "Rob on the Road" featured the California dogface butterfly on one of its shows: http://vids.kvie.org/video/3002661342/
In 2019, the U.S. Postal Service issued a first-class stamp bearing its image.
And now, in the summer of 2020, plans are in the works to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its being named the state insect. At one of Kareofelas' Bohart Museum talks, he mentioned that July 28, 2022 "will be 50 years since the dogface butterfly was named the California state insect and that we should do something to celebrate that fact." PLT officials have similar thoughts. They are collaborating for a memorable celebration.
Stay tuned. The celebration, like the colorful butterfly, will take flight.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The paper appears in the current edition of Journal of Hydrobiologia.
“The water hyacinth, Eichhornia crassipes, is considered the world's most economically damaging aquatic weed,” said author Emily Bick, a UC Davis alumnus and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
The free-floating perennial, native to the Amazon region of South America, is highly invasive throughout the world. It forms large floating mats when its roots and leaves intertwine. The aquatic weed is a major issue in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in central California.
“This paper is the result of my first dissertation chapter,” said Bick, an agricultural entomologist who received both her master's degree (2017) and doctorate in entomology (2019) from UC Davis. “We aimed to determine if salinity was the reason N. bruchi was not effective at regulating the weed in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta compared with other worldwide locations. The results were not as clear cut as we hoped, as the study was limited in testing only adult weevils. However, the paper makes the case for including salinity as a screening variable for new biological control agents that are candidates for release in the Delta and other partially saline areas. Also, given the thoroughness of the experiments, there is at least one cool modeling paper to come out as a follow-up.”
All-Hands-on-Deck
The paper, titled “Effects of Salinity and Nutrients on Water Hyacinth and its Biological Control Agent, Neochetina bruchi, “was truly an all-hands-on-deck effort,” Bick said. "Specifically, a major project hurdle was the temperature in Davis."
She related that the greenhouse experiments on water hyacinth “weren't producing consistent results due to the high variation—and high heat--in water temperature.” So fellow scientists Danny Klittich, then a UC Davis doctoral student in entomology with the Michael Parrella laboratory, and Bob Starnes, then UC Davis senior superintendent of agriculture, built a giant water bath out of a leftover evaporative cooler from the Michael Parrella lab.
Klittich is now the California Central Coast Agronomist with Redox Chemicals and chief executive officer and founder at HowToGrowRoses.org. Starnes is vice president of agriculture for UAV-IQ (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Intelligence.
In addition to Klittich and Starnes, other co-authors are UC Davis postdoctoral scholar Elvira deLange of the Christian Nansen lab; then doctoral student Cindy Kron of the Frank Zalom laboratory; and undergraduate students Jessie Liu and Derrick Nguyen. Kron, now with UC Cooperative Extension, is the North Coast Area Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Advisor, serving Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino and Lake counties.
The Abstract
“Water hyacinth, Eichhornia crassipes (Mart.) Solms (Commelinales: Pontederiaceae), is an important aquatic weed worldwide. Previous studies demonstrate that releases of Neochetina bruchi Hustache (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) provide biological control in many locations, but not all. Notably, N. bruchi were unsuccessful at regulating water hyacinth in tidal brackish waters. Abiotic factors, including salinity and nutrients, affect water hyacinth growth, but little is known about the impact of salinity on weevil survival. We hypothesized that N. bruchi has a relatively low salinity tolerance. In a mesocosm experiment, we assessed weed growth in response to a range of salinity and nutrient concentrations. In a laboratory, we assessed adult N. bruchi mortality in response to various salinity concentrations. Results indicate that increasing nutrient concentration increases weed growth. When both nutrient and salinity levels were varied, nutrients increased leaf count, but not biomass, while salinity reduced growth and increased mortality. Increasing salinity concentrations increased adult weevil mortality; required concentrations were higher than that for weeds. Thus, these results did not provide support for the suggested hypothesis. Potential effects of salinity via other exposures to weevils need to be investigated. Elucidating abiotic factors important for weed growth and weevil survival may increase effectiveness of water hyacinth management practices.”
The water hyacinth was introduced in California in 1904. Scientists trace its history in the United States back to 1884 at the New Orleans Exposition. “Samples are said to have been given to fair-goers, and within 4 years, coastal fresh waters were infested from Texas to Alabama. By 1972, the infestation in Florida was estimated to be 200,000 acres,” according to Cornell University. “Large, floating mats of waterhyacinth obstruct navigation, clog irrigation works, disrupt the natural ecology of wetlands in many ways, exacerbate mosquito problems, and are costly to the tourism and recreation industries.”
Two biocontrol agents, weevils N. eichhorniae and N. bruchi, natives of Argentina, and surrounding areas in South America, were released in 1972 and 1974, respectively.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Ever seen a back-lit monarch butterfly?
It's like a stained-glass window in a centuries-old steepled church where you cannot see the ugliness of the world, but its beauty.
Monarchs are like that. Those iconic butterflies excite, inspire and transform you, just like stained glass windows.
We captured these images at dusk of a monarch fluttering around an aphid-infested milkweed, a tropical milkweed, Asclepias curassavica, on Aug. 7 in Vacaville, Calif.
The orange butterfly was nothing but a blur until we stopped the action (1/4000 of a second) with a 200mm macro lens mounted on a Nikon D500.
The beauty (the monarch) eclipsed the beast (oleander aphids) in a moment of time.
