- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Yes, he does.
The jolly ol' gent wants to assure that no one has a "silent night," not with all the insect-themed gifts there: jewelry such as bee and monarch pins and beetle wing earrings; books for children and adults; note cards; T-shirts and hoodies; stuffed toy animals; posters showcasing dragonflies and California state insect, the dogface butterfly, coffee cups with the dogface butterfly motif; stickers; insect snacks; and hand-turned lathed pens by entomologist Jeff Smith, who curates the Lepidoptera collection at the Bohart.
One of the children's books is "The Story of the Dogface Butterfly," authored in 2013 by entomologist Fran Keller, a professor at Folsom Lake College, a Bohart Museum research scientist, and a UC Davis doctoral alumna.
Found only in California, the rarely seen butterfly is also known as (1) "the flying pansy," referring to the male's spectacular black and yellow coloring, and (2) as a "dog head" butterfly (the markings on the male resemble a silhouette of a dog's head). The female is mostly solid yellow. The butterfly's major breeding ground is in Auburn in the Shutamul Bear River Preserve maintained by the Placer Land Trust (PLT).
The insect museum, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus, is open to the public from 8 a.m. to noon and from 1 to 5 p.m., Monday through Thursday (except on holidays). It will be closed for the winter break from Dec. 23 to Jan. 1.
The Bohart Museum houses a global collection of eight million insect specimens. It is also the home of a live petting zoo, which includes Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects (aka walking sticks) and tarantulas.
UC Davis distinguished professor Lynn Kimsey, a UC Davis doctoral alumna, has directed the Bohart Museum since 1990. Her major professor, Richard Bohart (1913-2007) founded the insect museum in 1946.
For more information contact, the Bohart Museum at bmuseum@ucdavis.edu or access its website at https://bohart.ucdavis.edu.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Mark your calendars for the eagerly awaited open houses and special events at the Bohart Museum of Entomology.
The Bohart has announced its 2024 special events, which include three open houses and participation in the 13th annual UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day, and 110th annual UC Davis Picnic Day. All are free and family friendly.
The schedule:
Saturday, Jan. 20:
"Social Wasps," 1 to 4 p.m., featuring UC Davis distinguished professor Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum. She recently received the 2023 Exceptional Faculty Award from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Kimsey, a recognized authority on insect biodiversity, systematics and biogeography of parasitic wasps, urban entomology, civil forensic entomology, and arthropod-related industrial hygiene, is a 34-year member of the UC Davis entomology faculty. She has directed the Bohart Museum since 1990. She plans to retire in 2024. (See news story)
Saturday, Feb. 10:
13th Annual Biodiversity Museum Day, all day. Last year 13 UC Davis museums or collections participated: Arboretum and Public Garden, Bohart Museum of Entomology, Botanical Conservatory. California Raptor Center. Center for Plant Diversity, Department of Anthropology Museum, Marine Invertebrate Collection, Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, Nematode Collection, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences Paleontology Collection, and Phaff Yeast Culture Collection.
Sunday, March 3:
"Grasshoppers, Crickets and Katydids." Talk and a question-and-answer forum from 1 to 2 p.m. Open museum, 2 to 4 p.m. Heading the event is UC Davis undergraduate student Sol Wantz, a senior majoring in entomology and a member o the lab of community ecologist and professor Neal Williams. She serve as president of the UC Davis Entomology Club.
Saturday, April 20:
110th UC Davis Picnic Day, all day. This is billed as the largest student-run event in the country. It is UC Davis' annual open house with hundreds of free and family friendly events. Entomology displays, exhibits and activities planned by the Department of Entomology and Nematology will be at the Bohart Museum and at Briggs Hall.
Sunday, May 19:
"Bees: Both Wild and Managed," 1 to 4 p.m. Presenters will include community ecologist Rachel Vannette, associate professor and vice chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
The Bohart Museum, founded in 1946, is located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus. It houses a global collection of eight million insect specimens, plus a live petting zoo (including Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects, and tarantulas) and a insect-themed gift shop, stocked with t-shirts, hoodies, jewelry, books, posters, pens, and more.
The Bohart Museum is open to the public Monday through Thursday. Casual walk-in hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and from 1 to 5 p.m. Pre-arranged tours (schools, scouts, UC classes) may also occur during these times. The museum will be closed for the winter holiday break, Dec. 23-Jan. 1. More information is on the website or by contacting bmuseum@ucdavis.edu. Tabatha Yang serves as the education and outreach coordinator, and Brennen Dyer as the collections manager.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The schedule:
Saturday, Jan. 20:
"Social Wasps," 1 to 4 p.m., featuring UC Davis distinguished professor Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum. She recently received the 2023 Exceptional Faculty Award from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Kimsey, a recognized authority on insect biodiversity, systematics and biogeography of parasitic wasps, urban entomology, civil forensic entomology, and arthropod-related industrial hygiene, is a 34-year member of the UC Davis entomology faculty. She has directed the Bohart Museum since 1990. She plans to retire in 2024. (See news story)
Saturday, Feb. 10:
13th Annual Biodiversity Museum Day, all day. Last year 13 UC Davis museums or collections participated: Arboretum and Public Garden, Bohart Museum of Entomology, Botanical Conservatory. California Raptor Center. Center for Plant Diversity, Department of Anthropology Museum, Marine Invertebrate Collection, Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, Nematode Collection, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences Paleontology Collection, and Phaff Yeast Culture Collection.
"Grasshoppers, Crickets and Katydids." Talk and a question-and-answer forum from 1 to 2 p.m. Open museum, 2 to 4 p.m. Heading the event is UC Davis undergraduate student Sol Wantz, a senior majoring in entomology and a member o the lab of community ecologist and professor Neal Williams. She serve as president of the UC Davis Entomology Club.
110th UC Davis Picnic Day, all day. This is billed as the largest student-run event in the country. It is UC Davis' annual open house with hundreds of free and family friendly events. Entomology displays, exhibits and activities planned by the Department of Entomology and Nematology will be at the Bohart Museum and at Briggs Hall.
Sunday, May 19:
"Bees: Both Wild and Managed," 1 to 4 p.m. Presenters will include community ecologist Rachel Vannette, associate professor and vice chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
The Bohart Museum, founded in 1946, is located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus. It houses a global collection of eight million insect specimens, plus a live petting zoo (including Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects, and tarantulas) and a insect-themed gift shop, stocked with t-shirts, hoodies, jewelry, books, posters, pens, and more.
The Bohart Museum is open to the public Monday through Thursday. Casual walk-in hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and from 1 to 5 p.m. Pre-arranged tours (schools, scouts, UC classes) may also occur during these times. The museum will be closed for the winter holiday break, Dec. 23-Jan. 1. More information is on the website or by contacting bmuseum@ucdavis.edu. Tabatha Yang serves as the education and outreach coordinator, and Brennen Dyer as the collections manager.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
There's plenty to love and purchase in the Bohart Museum of Entomology gift shop and on the UC Davis Entomology Graduate Student Association (EGSA) website.
EGSA members design insect and arachnid-themed T-shirts that climb, crawl, jump, roll, flutter, buzz, fly or otherwise position themselves on EGSA T-shirts. They can be viewed and ordered online at https://mkt.com/UCDavisEntGrad/.
EGSA president Mia Lippey, a doctoral student in the laboratories of UC Davis distinguished professor Jay Rosenheim and assistant professor Emily Meineke, says that currently, the designs offered are:
- The Beetles (in black or red)
- Entomo Gothic (a play on the American Gothic, in grey)
- Whip Scorpion (in lavender and black)
- Bee-Haw (in black)
- They See Me Rollin' (dung beetles rolling a poop, in heather blue)
- Et in Terra (dark green)
- Entomophagy (in blue and green)
At the Bohart Museum, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, the gift shop is stocked with everything from T-shirts, hooded sweatshirts, jewelry, books, posters, stickers, and note cards to lathe pens and insect-collecting equipment. See more at https://bohart.ucdavis.edu/line-gift-shop. Items may be purchased only in the gift shop, not online.
New items include tardigrade, bumble bee and monarch pens, monarch and stick insect stickers from a local artist, and a new mosquito stuffed toys or plushies, including a giant one that comes with viruses, said Brennen Dyer, the Bohart Museum's (specimen) collection manager.
Newest t-shirts are designed with tardigrades, also known as water bears. The Bohart Museum's tardigrade current collection includes some 25,000 slide-mounted specimens, and a six-foot-long concrete sculpture by Solomon Bassoff of North San Juan, Calif., graces the entrance to the Academic Surge building.
The Bohart Museum, founded in 1946, is directed by UC Davis distinguished professor Lynn Kimsey. It houses a global collection of eight million insect specimens. In addition to its gift shop, it is also the home of a live petting zoo. The Bohart is closed on specific days during the holiday season. See hours on the website.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
He points out that he is a Lepidopterist but "not a monarch specialist."
Shapiro's 10 monitoring sites stretch from the Sacramento River Delta through the Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada mountains to the high desert of the Western Great Basin. The largest and oldest database in North America, it was recently cited by British conservation biologist Chris Thomas in a worldwide study of insect biomass.
Shapiro records his research on his website at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/.
At the Bohart Museum open house, his topics included the research that he co-authored, "Understanding a Migratory Species in a Changing World: Climatic Effects and Demographic Declines in the Western Monarch Revealed by Four Decades of Intensive Monitoring" (Anne Espeset et al), published in Oecologica in 2017. Professor Matthew Forister of the University of Nevada, one of his former graduate students, is among the co-authors.
The abstract: "Migratory animals pose unique challenges for conservation biologists, and we have much to learn about how migratory species respond to drivers of global change. Research has cast doubt on the stability of the eastern monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) population in North America, but the western monarchs have not been as intensively examined. Using a Bayesian hierarchical model, sightings of western monarchs over approximately 40 years were investigated using summer flight records from ten sites along an elevational transect in Northern California. Multiple weather variables were examined, including local and regional temperature and precipitation. Population trends from the ten focal sites and a subset of western overwintering sites were compared to summer and overwintering data from the eastern migration. Records showed western overwintering grounds and western breeding grounds had negative trends over time, with declines concentrated early in the breeding season, which were potentially more severe than in the eastern population. Temporal variation in the western monarch also appears to be largely independent of (uncorrelated with) the dynamics in the east. For our focal sites, warmer temperatures had positive effects during winter and spring, and precipitation had a positive effect during spring. These climatic associations add to our understanding of biotic-abiotic interactions in a migratory butterfly, but shifting climatic conditions do not explain the overall, long-term, negative population trajectory observed in our data."
Handout. "When I was asked to participate in this event, it got me thinking…" Shapiro began in his monarch comments handout.
"My group did an analysis of the Monarch vis-à-vis climate in a 2017 paper (Espeset et al.,, DOI: 10.1007/s00442-01607600-1) None of my group is a Monarch specialist, and that includes me. Since 1999 I have done counts of all butterfly species at 4 Valley sites (Suisun, West Sacramento, North Sacramento and Rancho Cordova) using standard “Pollard walk” methods, slightly modified. As a result we have a quantitative picture of Monarchs in breeding season... Such data are very rare. Population estimates of Monarchs are typically based on the overwintering (non-breeding) aggregations and we know from published material that what breeding-season data exist routinely diverge from the overwintering data. That is, trends in population size as measured by overwinter animals are not routinely reflected in the summer numbers. There can be a variety of explanations for this. To me the most likely is that as a very mobile species, the Monarch may breed in different places in different years, so that a monitoring program like mine, based on a limited number of fixed, Intensively-monitored sites, is unlikely to capture this stochasticity in where Monarchs breed. I am attaching the overwintering estimates from the Xerces Society. Direct quantitative comparisons are inappropriate, but you can judge how well the local trends match them just by eyeball (until we develop a convincing statistical approach to the problem!)
"My assignment for today forced me back to the original data for my Valley sites. The actual data are reproduced on the attached sheets. It is immediately evident that:
- There is very high variability in Monarch numbers among years at all sites, but
- There are short-term trends that may be associated with climatic fluctuations, in particular drought, and
- Among my sites, Suisun has had the highest counts, partly but not entirely reflecting coastward migration from farther inland early in the season, but these high numbers have effectively disappeared—perhaps reflecting a systematic change in migratory trajectories, and
- Rancho Cordova has very consistently had the lowest counts, with little year-to-year variation compared to other sites..
"My interest is now piqued and I am going to go with this. From 1972 to 1998 at all sites, and from 1972 to date at our 5 mountain sites, monitoring was on a presence/absence basis only because there are too many species to Pollard-count simultaneously. But the seasonal distribution of the Monarch is still easily extracted. We know Monarch breeding seasonality has changed over the 50-year time span of this study. We also have devised and published methods to use presence-absence data (“day-positives”) as a crude proxy for population trends. This is perhaps a good moment to revisit the Espeset et al. paper and try to get into the specific components of Monarch trends. Suggestions are welcome!" (amshapiro@ucdavis.edu)
Shapiro, who joined the UC Davis faculty in 1971, continues his research. The author of the book, Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento Valley Regions, he has studied more than 160 species of butterflies in his transect.
