Bug Squad

If you're looking for a worthy cause to support during the giving season (and as a bonus, receive a tax deduction), think tardigrades, aka water bears. Or more specifically, think "sculpture in front of the Bohart Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Davis.

It's all about the bumble bees... And now doctoral candidate John Mola of the Neal Williams lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, will present his exit seminar on "Bumble Bee Movement Ecology and Response to Wildfire" at 4:10 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 9 in Room 122 of Briggs Hall.

Consider the tsetse fly. The blood-sucking insect, which transmits the parasite that causes human and animal trypanosomiasis, has wreaked havoc in African countries.

Fact: Eighty percent of the world's population eat insects. Fact: At least 80 percent of those attending the Bohart Museum of Entomology's open house on entomophagy ate one or more insects--a cricket, an earthworm or a mealworm. The diners ranged in age from a 9-month-old girl to senior citizens.

A monarch butterfly fluttered into our pollinator garden in Vacaville yesterday and sipped nectar from a Mexican sunflower (Tithonia) as a bird looked on. Well, sort of looked on. The bird was decorative art. The monarch was real. Now if that bird had been real, the monarch may have been a meal.