DAVIS--It may be the collector in her.

Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Davis, not only oversees a collection of nearly eight million insect specimens, but she collects something else—something that could appear in a national stand-up comedian act.

Entomological funnies. Bug stuff.

“College students—especially under the crunch of a deadline—can write the darndest things,” says Kimsey, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and an international authority on the taxonomy of bees and wasps and insect diversity.

Kimsey, known for her keen sense of humor, collects “the best of the best” sentences from the term papers she grades from her introductory entomology class. She  began collecting the gems in 1998.

“Some of these sentences are priceless,” Kimsey said. “You couldn't intentionally write something this good or bad depending on how you look at it.” 

Some students misplace their modifiers, add an adverb, or drop a crucial letter from a word, turning a “threat” into a “treat,” Kimsey said.

And some of the students' thinking—perhaps from sleep or coffee deprivation--can be as fuzzy as a caterpillar.

How do honey bees find their way home? “By navigating around the sun,” one student wrote.

Why are mosquitoes excellent vectors? “Because they can ingest and then infect viruses with ease through blood feeding,” penned another student.

What are pathogens? “Pathogens cause disease(s) like viruses and bacteria.”

What is biological control? “Nature has been executing biological control on all walks of life since it began on earth.”

And the definition of classical biological control? “Basically, classical biological control seeks to relieve pestering insects by establishing a predator in a new environment.”

Disease transmission does have its pitfalls. Wrote one student: “Knowing the way in which insects can transmit diseases and a way to avoid it can help us from getting tremendously ill or even dead.”

Locusts drew two choice comments:

“Other countries will also face losses (due to locusts) although at a rate of loss much less due to exhaustion from travel.”

“Normally, locusts are introverted creatures; they do not socialize unless it is for reproduction.”

Those traveling dragonflies: “These dragonflies are able to use the best of Mother Nature to assist travel.”

Secrete themselves? “After arriving at the popular, the sexuparae aphids move towards the trunk of the tree where they secrete themselves in order to reproduce.”

Major pests on what? “There have been instances in the Southeastern United States where several species of mole crickets have been accidentally introduced and have become major pests on turd (sic) and pasture grasses.”

Fast forward to adults: “In late winter the overwintering adults come out of diapause and migrate back to their main host population where they lay the first generation of summer adults.”

Wild vertebrae? “People living in high endemic areas also tend to live in close proximity not only to the vector of the disease but to reservoir hosts like dog, cats, and other wild vertebrae.”

Outreach activities? “Since either traps or insecticides can get access to perfect, out-reach activities and novel ideas related to D. suzukii management always come out.”

Recommended fumigation? “Fumigation has proven to be highly effective however, time consuming and the recommended process is aerosol spraying avian vehicles.”

Honey bees, too, yield interesting comments, said Kimsey, who served as president of the International Society of Hymenopterists from 2002 to 2004 and kept bees in her backyard for 10 years.

On mating and semen storage:  “This is the only time (honey bee) queens mate in their lifetime since the sperm can be stored longer than her lifetime.”

On the “beeping” industry: “This, similar bans, and a decrease in demand of packages and queens from the United States has hurt the commercial beeping industry.”

On the role of drones:  “Because the males in the Hymenoptera social structure do no work, they are considered a waste of the colony's energy, and as such, they are only laid when the colony can stand the strain.”

For the record, UC Extension apiculturist (emeritus) Eric Mussen, who just completed a 38-year career in June, explained that a honey bee queen usually takes a single mating flight during her lifetime and will mate with a dozen to twenty drones. “She stores the semen in her spermatheca and that's enough to last her entire lifetime, usually about two years. During the busy season, she will lay up to 2000 eggs a day.”

“If the drones don't mate, they will die of old age in about 35 days or they will get kicked out of the hive by their sisters in the fall,” Mussen said. “They are not needed when there are no virgin queens with which to mate and the drones are just extra mouths to feed.” 

Other sentences in Kimsey's “best of the best” collection include:

• "For every problem, there is a pest.”
• "Damage ranges from minor weakened plants to serious plant death.”
• "The arousal of nest mates by booty-laden foragers has been attributed to a conspicuous mechanical action caused by antennae and forelegs and supported by the scent of the trail substance…”
• "Although caterpillars are vulnerable and young, their ability to protect against predators has helped them become successful predators.”
• "Humans have been using and digesting insects for centuries, despite the wide array of chemicals they produce.”
• "Another way of penetrating the navel orange worm is with biological control.”
• "The actions of these (reproductive) workers can be reprimanded if they are a treat to the others in the colony.”
• "(Fire ant) mounds that are near plants are usually uprooted and overturned by the ants as the mound grows.”
• "The most important upgrade that some insects have acquired is the co-evolution with angiosperms.”
• "The illness has come out of a twenty-five year remission and has begun to infect many tropical islands.”

Kimsey, who received her doctorate in entomology from UC Davis in 1979 and joined the faculty in 1989, says there's “a possibility” she may write a book and include the classic answers.

“Maybe,” she said, “but I'm not sure where to go with these from here.”

The Harvard University's “RoboBee” will be the buzz on Wednesday, Dec. 10 at a virtual seminar sponsored by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

The noonhour seminar, titled "RoboBee: Using the Engineering Toolbox to Understand the Flight Apparatus of Flying Insects” will be broadcast remotely to 122 Briggs Hall. Hosted by distinguished professor James R. Carey,  the seminar takes place from 12:10 to 1 p.m.

Carey has arranged the virtual seminar with robotist and bioengineer Sawyer Buckminster Fuller, a postdoctoral scholar with Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

Researchers from the SEAS and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard built the flying robot insect, a project that took more than a decade. It culminated in the first controlled flight of an insect-sized, biologically inspired robot. Researchers Kevin Ma, Pakpong Chirarattananon, Sawyer Fuller and Robert Wood published their work in the May 3, 2013 edition of the journal Science.

The abstract: “Flies are among the most agile flying creatures on Earth. To mimic this aerial prowess in a similarly sized robot requires tiny, high-efficiency mechanical components that pose miniaturization challenges governed by force-scaling laws, suggesting unconventional solutions for propulsion, actuation, and manufacturing. To this end, we developed high-power-density piezoelectric flight muscles and a manufacturing methodology capable of rapidly prototyping articulated, flexure-based sub-millimeter mechanisms. We built an 80-milligram, insect-scale, flapping-wing robot modeled loosely on the morphology of flies. Using a modular approach to flight control that relies on limited information about the robot's dynamics, we demonstrated tethered but unconstrained stable hovering and basic controlled flight maneuvers. The result validates a sufficient suite of innovations for achieving artificial, insect-like flight.”

The remote-controlled flying robot is tethered to a wire at a base station that powers and controls its flight. In an article published in EurekAlert, SEAS communications writer Caroline Perry described the robot as “about half the size of a paperclip and weighing less than a 10th of a gram.”   The researchers based their work on the biology of a fly “with submillimeter-scale anatomy and two wafer-thin wings that flap almost invisibly, 120 times per second.”

In a March 2013 article, "The RoboBee Project is Building Flying Robits the Size of Insects," published in Scientific American, authors Robert Wood, Radhika Nagpal and Gu-Yeon Wei wrote: "Not too long ago a mysterious affliction called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) began to wipe out honeybee hives. These bees are responsible for most commercial pollination in the U.S., and their loss provoked fears that agriculture might begin to suffer as well. In 2009 the three of us, along with colleagues at Harvard University and Northeastern University, began to seriously consider what it would take to create a robotic bee colony. We wondered if mechanical bees could replicate not just an individual's behavior but the unique behavior that emerges out of interactions among thousands of bees. We have now created the first RoboBees—flying bee-size robots—and are working on methods to make thousands of them cooperate like a real hive."

They wrote that "Superficially, the task appears nearly impossible. Bees have been sculpted by millions of years of evolution into incredible flying machines. Their tiny bodies can fly for hours, maintain stability during wind gusts, seek out flowers and avoid predators. Try that with a nickel-size robot."

The RoboBee virtual seminar is the first of its kind hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and the last of the seminars for the fall quarter.

 

The malaria mosquito work of former UC Davis postdoctoral researcher Michelle Sanford and her colleagues recently drew widespread attention on the home page of the open-access journal F1000Research.

Sanford, lead author of "Plasmodium falciparum Infection Rates for Some Anopheles spp. from Guinea-Bissau, West Africa,” completed the research at UC Davis while she was funded by a National Institutes of Health T-32 training grant.

Sanford worked closely with medical entomologists Anthony Cornel of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology; and Gregory Lanzaro and Yoosook Lee of the Vector Genetics Laboratory,  Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, School of Veterinary Medicine. Cornel is based at the Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center, Parlier, and also works in the Vector Genetics Lab. 

The abstract:

"Malaria is among the leading causes of childhood mortality in Guinea-Bissau, comprising 18% of mortality of children less than five years of age as of 2010 (WHO, 2010). However, the human malaria incidence rate in Guinea Bissau varies considerably from year to year with a general decrease in recent years to about 3 children (Ursing et al., 2014). Plasmodium falciparum predominates, causing 98% cases, followed by a few cases of Plasmodium malariae and Plasmodium ovale. Mixed infections of P. malariae, and to a lesser extent P. ovale, have been recorded but appear to be rare and highly variable in both Guinea-Bissau (Snounou et al., 1993) and neighboring Senegal (Fontenille et al., 1997a; Fontenille et al., 1997b).

"Limited research has been conducted on the vectors and malaria parasite infection rates in Guinea-Bissau populations of Anopheles species in general and there is no data on comparative infection rates between A. gambiae and A. coluzzii and members of the A. gambiae complex. Variability is also high among the Anopheles spp. implicated as vectors in this region of West Africa in terms of both their temporal population dynamics as well as species composition among study sites (Carnevale et al., 2010; Fontenille et al., 1997a; Jaenson et al., 1994; Snounou et al., 1993).

"Here we present much needed data on P. falciparum infection of Anopheles spp. specimens collected from inside and around associated human habitations at eight sites in Guinea-Bissau."

Other co-authors, in addition to Cornel, Lanzaro and Lee are  Catelyn Nieman, Allison Weakley and Sarah Han, all of the UC Davis Vector Genetics Lab; and Joao Dinis and Amabelia Rodrigues, National Institute of Public Health, Bissau, Guinea-Bissau.,

Sanford now works as a forensic entomologist at the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, Texas Medical Center, Houston. While at UC Davis, she helped organize the World Malaria World Day observances.

Sanford received her bachelor of science degree in biology, with a minor in entomology, from UC Riverside in 2000; her master's degree in entomology from UC Riverside in 2003 and her doctorate in entomology from Texas A&M University in 2010.  Her dissertation: “Observations on the Associative Learning Capabilities of Adult Culex quinquefasciatus Say and Other Mosquitoes.”

Active in the Entomological Society of America (ESA), Sanford won the John Henry Comstock Award, Southwestern Branch of ESA, in 2009. She received the 2010 Outstanding Achievement in Doctoral Research Award from Texas A&M in 2010, and a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to Thailand in 2007. 

Diane Ullman, professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, and a longtime administrator, has received the Entomological Society of America's 2014 distinguished achievement award in teaching. 

Her colleague, ESA president Frank Zalom, a distinguished professor in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, presented the award at the organization's recent meeting in Portland, Ore.

This is the highest honor that the 7000-member ESA presents to its outstanding teachers.

Ullman chaired the UC Davis Department of Entomology in 2004-2005, and served as an associate dean for undergraduate academic programs, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences from 2005 to 2014.  There she led curriculum and program development, student recruitment and outreach, and she administrated all undergraduate academic activities.

Ullman is known for innovative, multidisciplinary teaching strategies that connect science and art programs that mentor the next generation of scientists and help undergraduates succeed. Key examples are the Art/Science Fusion Program (using experiential learning to enhance scientific literacy), the Career Discovery Group Program (training mentors to help students explore careers and select majors), and the national Thrips-Tospovirus Educational Network (training graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to mentor new scientists).

Ullman's research revolves around insects that transmit plant pathogens, in particular plant viruses. She is best known for advancing international knowledge of interactions between thrips and tospoviruses and aphids and citrus tristeza virus. Her contributions have played a fundamental role in developing novel strategies for management of insects and plant viruses. She leads a $3.75 million Coordinated Agricultural Project, and has authored more than 100 refereed publications.

Highly honored for her work, Ullman is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2014) and ESA (2011). Among her many honors: the USDA Higher Education Western Regional Award for Excellence in College and University Teaching (1993), the UC Davis Chancellor's Achievement Award for Diversity and Community (2008), and the 2014 Distinguished Award in Teaching from ESA's Pacific Branch.

Ullman received her bachelor's degree in horticulture from the University of Arizona in 1976 and her doctorate  in entomology from UC Davis in 1985. She began her career in 1987 at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, relocating in 1995 to UC Davis' Department of Entomology and Nematology. Ullman also holds a joint appointment with the graduate programs of the Department of Entomology and Nematology, and the Department of Plant Pathology. 

“Dr. Ullman is a world-renowned and highly respected teacher, but she is an outstanding mentor, researcher and administrator who combines innovation, energy, talent and dedication to help students learn, retain that knowledge, and succeed in class, college and life. They cannot praise her enough, and neither can we,” the nominating team wrote.