- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The purpose of the congressional briefing was to raise awareness for and increase understanding of areawide integrated pest management (AIPM) and the benefits of a comprehensive pest management policy, particularly as it relates to invasive species, Zalom said.
A newly authored bill by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) and Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Florida) seeks a broader expansion of AIPM and a broader invasive species policy. The bill, the Areawide Integrated Pest Management (AIPM) Act of 2018 (H.R. 5411), would amend the Agricultural Research, Extension and Education Reform Act of 1998 with respect to enabling competitive grants for certain areawide integrated pest management projects, and for other purposes.
Zalom moderated the panel and delivered a presentation on the history of AIPM and the need to manage some pests on an areawide basis. AIPM is particularly useful for sites that are not suitable for management on an individual basis, such as natural and urban areas or for public health pests. It is similar to IPM, Zalom said, in that its focus is on implementing systems-based strategies that utilize multiple tactics which emphasize prevention, avoidance, monitoring, and suppression using practices that are biologically-based and reduce risk to human health and the environment. However, its focus is on managing pest populations in all the habitats in which they occur. It involves multi-year strategic planning and organization, and it tends to utilize technologies that may be difficult or less effective when used on a limited scale.
Zalom drew attention to past areawide successes in controlling the yellow fever mosquito, the screw worm fly, and tephritid fruit flies in Hawaii. He also described the recently concluded areawide program that targeted the European grapevine moth which had been introduced into northern California, threatening the state's wine industry. First found in Napa County in 2009, the moth was eventually detected in nine California counties. A partnership that included the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), California Department of Food and Agriculture, County Agricultural Commissioner's Offices, grape growers, and University of California Cooperative Extension Advisers and specialists implemented an applied research and public outreach and engagement program that ultimately resulted in the elimination of the insect from throughout these grape-growing areas. (See information on the award-winning European Grapevine Moth Team.)
Gabbard, in particular, wants to protect Hawaii's coffee industry from the recently introduced coffee berry borer, and Yoho, the U.S. citrus industry from the Asian citrus psyllid and the devastating bacterial disease that it vectors.
Partner host organizations included the ESA, Weed Science Society of America and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU).
Four panelists—Faith Oi of the University of Florida, Lee Van Wychen of the Weed Science Society of America, Paula Shrewsbury of the University of Maryland and Kelley Tilmon of Ohio State University--zeroed in on urban pests, aquatic pests, forestry pests, and agricultural pests, respectively, and the industry impacts.
- Oi elaborated on mosquitoes, including the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, a major public health issue.
- Van Wychen discussed the waterhyacinth, an aquatic pest in the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta and Everglades in Florida.
- Shrewsbury drew attention to the emerald ash borer, a pest in both urban and rural forests
- Tilmon covered the agricultural pest, the brown marmorated stink bug.
The panelists focused on various geographic topics to help Congressional offices from across the nation understand why AIPM is relevant to them and to support AIPM-related policies.
AIPM strategies not only offer important economic, health and environmental benefits, Zalom said, but the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 directs federal agencies to use IPM techniques in carrying out pest management activities.
The briefing drew representatives from congressional offices with invasive species or pest management priorities, as well as the House Committees on Natural Resources; Agriculture; Interior, Environment, and related agencies; Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources; the corresponding Senate committees; and relevant caucuses on invasive species and agricultural research.
Federal agencies represented included the Department of the Interior; USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI), Agricultural Research Service (ARS), Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). Forest Service, and Office of Pest Management Policy; and the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
The AIPM Act of 2018 creates a framework within the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture Crop and Pest Management Program to coordinate AIPM projects with other federal agencies and cross-institutional teams, including farmers, ranchers, and land managers.
The objectives, as cited by the bill's authors:
- To support long term and sustainable solutions to reduce invasive species impacts on agriculture, including grazing, dairy farming and natural resources
- Increase the return on investments for farmers, ranchers and land managers by providing them with multiple invasive species management options
- Empower end-users—farmers, ranchers and land managers—to take a larger role in creating solutions for their agricultural business and industries
- Support efficient use of federal dollars through competition to control and/or eradicate invasive species
- Protect human health and the environment
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Hammock will present a plenary lecture on Thursday, May 31, offering an overview of the current state of the science in the area of oxidized lipids.
ISSFAL is “the leading showcase of what is new, exciting, and interesting in science and research in this field,” said executive committee member and organizing committee chair Hee Yong Kim, who serves as chief of the laboratory of Molecular Signalling for the National Institute of Health's National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIH/NIAAA).
Hammock is known for his work on using natural chemical mediators to control inflammation and intractable pain. He continues as the founding director of the campuswide Superfund Research Program--this is the 31st year--and the NIH's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Combined Analytical Laboratory. He has directed the NIH/ NIEHS Combined Analytical Laboratory for 25 years.
Hammock co-discovered the soluble epoxide hydrolase, and many of his more than 1100 publications and patents are on the P450 branch of the arachidonate cascade where the soluble epoxide hydrolase degrades natural analgesic and anti - inflammatory compounds. The founder of several companies, he has helped raise more than $50 million in private capital, and currently is chief executive officer of the Davis-based EicOsis, where an orally active non- addictive drug for inflammatory and neuropathic pain is being developed for human beings companion animals. EicOsis is supported by several seed-fund grants and a NIH/NINDS (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke) Blueprint Development Grant.
Highly honored by his peers, Hammock is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, which honors academic invention and encourages translations of inventions to benefit society. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the Entomological Society of America, and the recipient of the Bernard B. Brodie Award in Drug Metabolism, sponsored by the America Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. He is the first McGiff Memorial Awardee in Lipid Biochemistry.
The Eicosanoid Research Foundation recently honored him for work on oxidized lipids. (See more on his website)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
But have you ever heard of a song featuring the three-cornered alfalfa hopper, Spissistilus festinus, and another one spotlighting the male insect organ, the aedeagus?
And composed by a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, and performed by seven insect-attired UC Davis doctoral students?
That's what happened during the recent UC Davis Picnic Day celebration when the septet gathered in front of Briggs Hall to perform three songs composed by talented musician and entomologist Michael Bollinger, enrolled in the master's degree program, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. The group performed Bollinger's compositions, “E Major Homeboy (Spissistilus festinus),” “Tragedy (of the Clocks)," and "Jackson's Song (Aedeagal Bits)," as well as a cover song, “Island in the Sun” by Weezer.
The performance went well. Very well. So did Picnic Day.
“My goal was to make sure Picnic Day worked overall, and that, for the band, the sounds were balanced and each of the elements could be heard,” said emcee and band member Brendon Boudinot, president of the UC Davis Entomology Graduate Student Association (EGSA) and a doctoral candidate specializing in ant evolution and classification.
The “Entomology at UC Davis” exhibit at Briggs Hall, the work of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, won the campuswide “At One With Nature” category. And the band? It drew loud applause and high praise from the standing crowd.
Their name: “The Entomology Band.” (No take-offs of the iconic “Beatles,” “Buddy Holly and the Crickets” or “Adam and the Ants.”)
Bollinger's original songs capped a day of insect-related activities that included maggot art, cockroach races, nematode identification, scavenger hunts, and honey tasting.
- Molecular geneticist and drummer Yao “Fruit Fly” Cai of the Joanna Chiu lab, dressed in a fruit fly costume, Drosophila melanogaster, which he described as “our favorite model organism in Insecta!”
- Bark beetle specialist and rhythm guitarist Jackson “Darth Beetle” Audley of the Steve Seybold lab, portrayed an Asian longhorned beetle, Anoplophora glabripennis
- Honey bee researcher and bass guitarist Wei “Silverfish” Lin of the Brian Johnson lab, wore a costume that celebrated his moniker, Lepisma saccharina, a small, wingless insect in the order Zygentoma
- Ant specialist and keyboard artist Zachary “Leptanilla” Griebenow of the Phil Ward lab, dressed as “a generic male leptanilline ant (Formicidae: Leptanillinae).” He said: “The yellow color “is not anywhere near so vivid in real life.”
- Systematist and tenor saxophonist Jill “Jillus Saximus” Oberski of the Phil Ward lab, dressed as a “generalized heteropteran,” which she described as “most likely a member of the family Acanthosomatidae (shield bug) or Pentatomidae (stink bug). My family and friends have called me Jillybug, so I came to be the band's representative of Hemiptera.”
- Molecular geneticist and vocalist Christine “The Clock” Tabuloc of the Joanna Chiu lab, wrapped herself in butterfly wings
- Ant specialist and bass guitarist Brendon “Hype Man-tis” Boudinot of the Phil Ward lab, dressed in a green helmet, a blue and gold EGSA bee shirt and a UC Davis cow costume to showcase his department and campus-wide love of bovines.
The seven band members share a love of music.
Drummer Yao Cai, who grew up in Southeast China and holds an undergraduate degree in plant protection and a master's degree from China Agricultural University, has been playing drums since age 17. “We formed as a short-lived band for a show. After that, I realized that I really wanted to keep playing and improved my drum techniques. Thus, we started another band in college and played for six years in college, as an undergrad and graduate student.
“It is very interesting that I was in a band that was the first band in Department of Entomology in China Agricultural University and now we started the first band in Department of Entomology at UC Davis.”
Rhythm guitarist Jackson Audley said he “started learning to play the guitar when I was about 11-12 ish. The first band I joined was a Blink-182 cover band, in which I played the bass guitar, and we played together for most of eighth grade. Then in early high school I joined a Smashing Pumpkins/Radiohead cover band as the second guitarist. Shortly after joining that band, we started making predominantly original music. By the end of high school, we had played a few small shows around the Atlanta area and had recorded a few songs. Unfortunately, the band did not survive the transition into university and we broke up.”
Since then he's mostly played “for fun and I like to jam with folks.”
Jill Oberski, a native of Twin Cities, grew up mostly in Chaska, Minn., “a sleepy suburb of Minnesota.” She received her bachelor's degree in Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., where she double-majored in biology and German studies.
“I started playing the piano in kindergarten, and switched to saxophone in fifth grade,” Oberski related. “I played classical and jazz in my school bands from sixth grade through college, and pit orchestra / pep band / marching band in high school as well. I've always been better at classical than rock/jazz/Latin.”
“I probably reached my highest point in late high school, when I served as co-section leader for the saxes in the Minnesota all-state symphonic band--we even got to play a concert in Minneapolis' orchestra hall. These days I'm only involved in the entomology band and some very casual ukulele playing.”
Brendon Boudinot, who received his bachelor's degree in entomology at the Evergreen State College, Olympia, Wash., performed on a metallic sky-blue bass. “I just love art,” he said. “Music is a family thing for me in a number of different ways. Although I have played instruments alone or in groups for many years, nothing really clicked in me until I heard Michael and Yao play together. They shred.”
“The Entomology Band is special to me, and I am just glad I could be a part of it.”
Vocalist Christine Anne Tabuloc, who grew up in the Los Angeles area and received her bachelor's degree from UC Davis in biochemistry and molecular biology, says she does not play an instrument. “I'm far less talented than everyone else in the group,” she quipped. “I've been singing for as long as I can remember. I've been writing lyrics since elementary school. However, I never got around to getting music written for them. I was in choir before and have had solos but that's pretty much it.”
Bass guitarist Wei Lin, who grew up in Xiamen, "a beautiful island in southern China," received his bachelor's and master's degree in China Agricultural University, majoring in plant protection and entomology. “This was my first experience in a band. I just started to learn bass last year when this band was built.”
Following the four-set gig, Boudinot told the appreciative crowd, “That's all we know!”
Pending performances? “The band,” he said, “is on hiatus.”
Or diapause.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Page, a pollination ecologist, was one of 69 awardees selected from more than 3600 applicants. Her fellowship is funded by the Department of Defense.
“The fellowship is well deserved,” said Williams, her major professor and a pollination ecologist and a UC Davis Chancellor's Fellow. “Maureen is a talented researcher, who shows a real passion for her research that is combined with a highly analytical meticulous approach.”
Of her project, Williams said: “Her work melds careful field sampling with advanced analysis, including computational optimization modeling. It will move existing research to a new level by exploring the nutritional basis of competitive interactions among pollinators. The project builds from a solid foundation but his highly innovative. Its results should be of tremendous value to the scientific community, but are also highly relevant for decision making to promote sustainable food systems for California and beyond.”
Page received her bachelor's degree in biology, cum laude, from Scripps College, Claremont, Calif., in 2016, and then enrolled in the UC Davis entomology graduate program, with a career goal of becoming a professor and principal investigator.
“I became interested in UC Davis because I was interested in working in Neal's lab,” she related. “After my sophomore year of college, I participated in National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates (NSF REU) with the Chicago Botanic Gardens. One of the professors I was working with, Jennifer Ison, told me that my research interests aligned well with the work coming out of Neal's lab and I quickly realized she was right.”
“I even bookmarked the Williams lab webpage so I could check for recent papers!” Page said. “Neal is an even better advisor than I could have hoped for and I feel very grateful to be a part of UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.”
Her dissertation research focuses on using plant-pollinator interaction networks to (1) assess the impact of honey bee introductions on native plant pollination and (2) optimize wildflower plantings to simultaneously support honey bee health and diverse native bee communities.
“I've always loved flowers and I think my love of bees grew out of my academic interest in pollination ecology and a desire to apply my talents towards research that would benefit farmers and pollinator conservation efforts,” said Page, a native of San Francisco but who grew up in Ashland, Ore.
As a volunteer researcher for Southern Oregon University, she worked on a watershed project in the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, and was named the City of Ashland's Conservationist of the Year in April 2012. The city honored her at its Earth Day celebration.
Keenly interested in bee research, Page received a 2013 Scripps Environmental Research Grant to establish a solitary bee monitoring program at the Bernard Field Station in Claremont. She created a reference collection and species list of bee diversity at the field station, gaining experience collecting, pinning and identifying bee specimens. She presented her findings at the Scripps Undergraduate Research Symposium. Page later worked on a project categorizing pollen deposition by the yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenkii to California figwort, Scrophularia california.
What fascinates her about bees? “Tough question!” said Page, who is the first entomologist in her family. “Bees are so very interesting for so many different reasons! I'm particularly fascinated by the relationship between bees and flowers--with bees acting as pollinators and flowers offering bees important pollen and nectar resources. I think the biggest misconception is that all bees are honey bees. In fact, there are more than 20,000 species in the world, only 7 of which are considered honey bees!”
An average day?
“My field season has started, so on an ‘average day' I'm at one of my lab's wildflower plantings by 7 a.m. and driving home with coolers of bees and flowers around 7 p.m.,” Page said. “The most fun part of my fieldwork is using something called a ‘mobile bouquet' to measure single-visit pollen deposition by different pollinator taxa to different plant taxa.”
Page was awarded a grant from the Davis Botanical Society earlier this year, and won second place in the graduate students' poster competition at the 2018 UC Davis Bee Symposium for her poster, “Impacts of Honey Abundance on the Pollination of Eschscholzia californica. Last year she received a Northern California Botanists' Grant and a Davis Botanical Society Grant.
Eager to reach youth about the importance of pollinators, Page began volunteering in 2016 for the Center for Land-Based Learning, mentoring students from Sacramento High School, and engaging them in hands-on conservation science at Say Hay Farms, a 20-acre family farm in Yolo County. She has taught students at her Davis area field site about the benefits of providing wildflower habitat for pollinators.
The UC Davis doctoral student has also presented lectures at the Hoes' Down Harvest Festival, Yolo County, on “Pollinators on the Farm” and led a kids' bug hunt. She presented an invited lecture on “Beneficial Insects in Home Gardens” to the El Dorado Master Gardeners, part of the UC Cooperative Extension program, and volunteered at their other activities.
Page serves as secretary of the UC Davis Entomology Graduate Student Association. In her leisure time, she enjoys “baking, rock climbing, learning new things, and sketching--mostly-flowers, bees, and sometimes butterflies.”
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Eastern Finland University in Kuopio will be his host institution, where he will work with James Blande of the Chemical Ecology Group, Department of Environmental Sciences. Grof-Tisza met Blande while he was collaborating with Karban--his major professor and now his postdoctoral advisor--on a project involving plant-plant communication and induced resistance within sagebrush.
“The focus of my Curie postdoc will be to continue this research and to investigate community-wide effects of volatile-mediated communication,” Grof-Tisza said. “I will conduct field research in the Eastern Sierra in the spring and summer and will spend the rest of the year in Finland conducting laboratory experiments and analyzing samples collected over the field season.”
Grof-Tisza's dissertation work involved investigating how bottom-up and top-down forces regulated a focal herbivore, the Ranchman's tiger moth (Arctia virginalis; the wooly bear caterpillar that Karban has been studying since 1983) within the Bodega Marine Reserve.
“Through this work, I became interested in plant defenses, both mechanical and chemical – the primary host plant of A. virginalis contains alkaloids, which are known to deter herbivores.” He also has collaborated on several projects with his lab mate, Eric LoPresti, who studies the efficacy of sand-entrapment as a defense in sticky plants.
“I applied to the Marie Currie Fellowship to continue studying plant defenses as well as learn laboratory techniques, including those pertaining to gene expression and mass spectrometry,” said Grof-Tisza who received his bachelor's degree in molecular biology, summa cum laude, at Frostburg (Md.) State University, and then worked as a biochemist in the biotech industry prior to enrolling in graduate school at UC Davis. As a member of the Ecology Graduate Group, he received his doctorate in 2015 from UC Davis, working with advisors Richard Karban and Marcel Holyoak, a professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy.
“This second postdoc,” Grof-Tisza said, “will allow me to combine the ecological knowledge I have gained as a graduate student with the laboratory skills I learned earlier in my career.”
In his fellowship proposal abstract, Grof-Tisza noted “Plants have evolved an impressive defense system to combat herbivores. These defenses include morphological structures like spines and secondary metabolites that have toxic, repellent, or antinutritional effects on consumers. Many plant defenses are constitutively expressed, but some are induced in response to herbivore damage. Damaged plants emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into the environment that may induce defenses in adjacent, undamaged tissue or may be eavesdropped by neighboring plants, enabling them to prime their own resistance response prior to attack.”
“While once controversial, this plant-plant communication resulting in a VOC-induced phenotypic response that reduces damage from attacking herbivores has been demonstrated in over 50 species,” he wrote. “Recently, researchers have found distinguishing VOC blends among sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) referred to as chemotypes. Field experiments demonstrated that communication between A. tridentata plants of the same chemotype resulted in less damage by herbivores compared to that between plants of different chemotypes. Chemotypes were also found to be highly heritable.”
Grof-Tisza wrote that “this is consistent with the hypothesis that volatile communication evolved as a within-plant warning mechanism due to limited vascular signaling. Because emitted volatile cues become available to potential competitors of the same or different species, selection for cues that are more private would likely be of greater benefit to the emitter. At the time of this study, only two A. tridentata chemotypes had been identified. More recent work has found an additional six chemotypes.
“Here we propose to rigorously test the ecological consequences of chemotypic variation and the processes that maintain it. Through synergistic efforts combining my expertise in field ecology and plant-insect interactions and that of the host and collaborators in ecological chemistry and molecular biology, we will forward the field of volatile-mediated plant-plant interactions.”
Grof-Tisza has published his work in a number of journals, including Ecology, Evolution and Ecology, Journal of Animal Ecology, Journal of Chemical Ecology, Ecological Entomology, Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, Biological Conservation and Oikos. He served as an adjunct professor with the Department of Science and Engineering, American River College, Sacramento, from 2015 to 2016.
Born in Queens, N.Y., but raised in Somerset, Pa., Grof-Tisza has resided in Davis since 2007.