- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's not as easy as it looks, but entomologist Jeff Smith, curator of the Bohart Museum of Entomology's Lepidoptera collection, makes it look easy.
If you attend the Bohart Museum open house, set from 1 to 4 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 28 in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus, you'll learn how he does it.
Indeed, it is no easy feat to pin a butterfly or moth. Just ask research entomologist Tom Zavorink, a Bohart Museum associate.
"Personally, I am astounded by the thousands upon thousands of butterflies and moths that Jeff has prepared for display or scientific study," Zavorink told us back in 2015, when the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences selected Smith for its Friend of the College Award.
"This is no small task," Zavortink said, "because butterfly and moth specimens are usually brought from the field in envelopes or boxes with their wings folded over their backs or around their bodies, and preparing them for display or scientific study involves relaxing them in a humid chamber so their wings and legs can be manipulated, carefully spreading open the wings, positioning them on a flat surface, and securing them in that position until the specimen dries again. This is an onerous task that many entomologists, myself included, shun because we don't have the time, manual dexterity, or patience it takes to prepare quality specimens."
A Bohart volunteer since 1998, Smith has spread the wings of some 180,000 moths and butterflies, typically 6,000 or more each year for the past 30-plus years. He has crafted and donated some 2,475 wooden specimen drawers, including 110 so far this year. He also has donated some 100,000 specimens (primarily butterflies, moths but a few other insects, including beetles) to the Bohart Museum.
The Lepidoptera collection now totals about 750,000 specimens. Lately Smith has been redoing the header labels in the unit trays for much of the Lepidoptera collection, "making the new ones in the better format where the geographic ranges of the various species and subspecies are on the label. This is so helpful when it comes to placing new material into the collection."
When Smith received the Friend of the College award, Bohart director Lynn Kimsey, now UC Davis distinguished professor emerita, said: “You could not ask for a better friend than Jeff Smith. He has brought us international acclaim and saved us $160,000 through donations of specimens and materials, identification skills and his professional woodworking skills. This does not include the thousands of hours he has donated in outreach programs that draw attention to the museum, the college and the university.”
“When Jeff was working for Univar Environmental Services, a 35-year career until his retirement in 2013, he would spend some of his vacation days at the museum. Over the years Jeff took over more and more of the curation of the butterfly and moth collection. He took home literally thousands of field pinned specimens and spread their wings at home, bringing them back to the museum perfectly mounted."
Smith engages in public outreach at the Bohart Museum's open houses, which include open houses with various themes, plus UC Davis Picnic Day, UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day, and Take-Your-Daughters-and-Sons-to-Work Day. In addition, Smith annually presents an evening spreading class to the UC Davis Entomology Club as well as an annual presentation to Bio Boot Camp. He also speaks at 12 to 15 other venues per year, engaging students at School Science Days and in individual classrooms.
"We will have an overview of terrestrial arthropods which encompasses everything from insects, arachnids, millipedes, isopods and centipedes," said Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordination. "We will also showcase some of the trapping/catching methods we use, for example, nets, lights, pitfall traps and malaise traps."
"We also get asked a lot of questions about our own collection and why the specimens don't decay," she added. "We will highlight the different curation techniques from pinning, point mounting, preserving in alcohol and mounting on slides."
Also planned is a tribute to the late UC Davis professor Richard "Doc" Bohart (1913-2007), who founded the insect museum in 1946, served as the first director, and compiled 32 years on the UC Davis entomology faculty, Sept. 28 is his birthday anniversary and a cake to celebrate what would have been his 111th birthday will be served.
Kimsey, his last graduate student, remembers him in the audio of a newly produced video by Walter Leal, UC Davis distinguished professor of molecular and cellular biology and former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology. Kimsey provides the narrative and images. Leal added excerpts from a 1996 Aggie Video production when Kimsey interviewed Bohart. (See https://youtu.be/3YqnK-CpbJE)
Luz Maria Robles, public information for the Sacramento-Yolo Mosquito and Vector Control, says the risk of contracting West Nile virus in Sacramento and Yolo counties continues. (See map of latest West Nile virus activity in the two counties.) This year, to date, the statistics show:
Sacramento County: 53 dead birds and 46 mosquito samples have tested positive for West Nile virus
Yolo County: 1 dead bird and 42 mosquito samples have tested positive for West Nile virus
The Bohart Museum houses a global collection of eight million insect specimens. It also is the home of a petting zoo (Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks, tarantulas and more) and an insect-themed gift shop, stocked with t-shirts,hoodies, books, posters,jewelry, stuffed animals, and insect collecting equipment.Museum director is professor and arachnologist Jason Bond, the Evert and Marion Schlinger Endowed Chair in Insect Systematics, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and associate dean of the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
For more information, contact bmuseum@ucdavis.edu.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The Bohart Museum will live-stream the free open house on Facebook. Entomologist Jeff Smith, who curates the 500,000 Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) collection, will show specimens and answer questions.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this is the Bohart Museum's first-ever Virtual Moth Open House.
“We started holding a moth-themed open house near Mother's Day in May, because people who are enthusiasts for moths are called moth-ers,” said Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator for the Bohart Museum. “We then switched our programming to align with National Moth Week. This year's Moth Week is July 18-26. The annual event is celebrated throughout the world with private and public events.
Bohart Museum officials are preparing videos on black-lighting and how to spread and pin moths.
During the Facebook Live program, viewers can type in their questions on moths.
Smith is expected to answer questions such as:
- What is the largest moth?
- How do butterflies and moths differ?
- What is so unique about moths?
- Why should we be concerned with moth diversity?
Smith received a 2015 Friend of the College Award from the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences for saving the museum some $160,000 over a 27-year period through his volunteer service.
Kimsey, who has directed the museum since 1989, remembers when Smith joined the museum. “When Jeff was working for Univar Environmental Services, a 35-year career until his retirement in 2013, he would spend some of his vacation days at the museum. Over the years Jeff took over more and more of the curation of the butterfly and moth collection. He took home literally thousands of field pinned specimens and spread their wings at home, bringing them back to the museum perfectly mounted. To date he has spread the wings on more than 200,000 butterflies and moths. This translates into something like 33,000 hours of work!” The numbers have since increased.
“About a decade ago, Jeff began helping us by assembling specimen drawers from kits that we purchased,” Kimsey related. “This substantially lowered our curatorial costs, from $50/drawer to $16/drawer. We use several hundred drawers a year to accommodate donated specimens, research vouchers and specimens resulting from research grants and inventories. More recently, he's been accumulating scrap lumber and making the drawers from scratch at no cost to us. Overall, he has made more than 2000 drawers. Additionally, he makes smaller specimen boxes with the leftover scrap wood, which are used by students taking various field courses in the department. We simply could not curate the collection without his contributions.”
Kimsey praised Smith for completely reorganizing the butterfly and moth collection. “It's no small feat to rearrange this many specimens, housed in roughly one thousand drawers,” she said. “Many thousands of the specimens needed to be identified, and the taxonomy required extensive updating and reorganization.”
The Bohart Museum, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus, houses a global collection of nearly eight million specimens. It is also the home of the seventh largest insect collection in North America, and the California Insect Survey, a storehouse of the insect biodiversity. Noted entomologist Richard M. Bohart (1913-2007) founded the museum.
Bohart Museum is the home of a “live” petting zoo featuring Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and tarantulas, and a gift shop, stocked with T-shirts, sweatshirts, books, jewelry, posters, insect-collecting equipment and insect-themed candy.
Link:
Spreading Wings: The Amazing Work of Bohart Museum Associate Jeff Smith
- Author: Erin Mahaney
When it recently rained for days in a row, I stood at the window and watched my weeds grow. I have quite the variety of weeds, as I suspect we all do, but some I don’t really mind. For example, Oxalis is extremely invasive, but it is somewhat pretty and is almost enjoyably easy to pull up from the soil. Even if I don’t always get all of the bulbs like I should, at least I can hold some hope that I’m weakening the bulbs by pulling up the rest of the plant. Plus, Oxalis goes dormant with the summer heat. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
But my least favorite? The wild onion, Allium triquetrum, which is also known as the three-cornered leek. It’s not an ugly weed—in fact, it is sometimes cultivated as an ornamental. It has flower stems of about 1 foot tall, with nodding clusters of small, bell-shaped, white flowers. Not surprisingly, it has a strong onion smell.
The wild onion multiplies quickly, spreading by bulbs and seeds, and it is very hard to remove once established. Like Oxalis, it can be controlled by digging up the entire plant, including the bulbs. But unlike Oxalis, which pulls up easily (thus giving me a false, yet satisfying, sense of accomplishment), wild onion snaps at the soil level every time I try to pull it up. So the entire plant must be dug up, which is difficult to do given the extent of its spread throughout the yard, its proximity to other more desirable plants, and the depth to which I must to dig. And I think that’s what I find so aggravating about the wild onion. I could quit work and dig wild onions for the rest of my days, but I’m still fairly sure that I will not prevail. It spreads so quickly and so thoroughly! So at best, I try to content myself with digging a few plants and snapping off the flower stalks so that the plants don’t spread even more via seed. I know there are worse weeds, but this wild onion is the one onion that makes me want to cry.