Bug Squad

Forest health promises to take a turn for the better, thanks to forest entomologists like Jackson Audley, a doctoral student at the University of California, Davis.

UC Davis chemical ecologist Walter Leal characterizes the work in his lab as "like bolas spiders." What are bolas spiders? Well, they're also known as angling or fishing spiders. That's because they don't spin a web, they hunt with a sticky glob of silk on the end of a line known as "bolas.

Sometimes there's a method to our madness, or madness to our method. Take the silver-spangled, orange-reddish butterfly, the Gulf Fritilllary (Agraulis vanillae). We spotted a female dive-bombing her host plant, the passionflower vine (Passiflora) in our pollinator garden in Vacaville.

"Extreme Bees in Extreme Environments: Bee Biogeography in the Atacama Desert." That's the title of a seminar tomorrow (Wednesday, May 29) by Laurence Packer, distinguished research professor in the Department of Biology, York University.

Mosquitoes apparently don't like entomologist James R. Carey, distinguished professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis.