If you have some free time during the holidays--free time, what's that?--and you're interested in insects, you'll want to watch a series of UC Davis insect "infomercials."

As a class assignment, 58 students in a UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology class, ENT 010 (“The Natural History of Insects”) produced a series of infomercials, spotlighting such insects as honey bees,  stingless bees, fungus-growing ants, jewel wasps and blow flies.

The topics also included insect migration, insect sociality, and entomophagy (consumption of insects). The videos range in duration from two-to-five-minutes.

The instructors: community ecologist Rachel Vannette, associate professor and vice chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and medical entomologist and geneticist Geoffrey Attardo.

The teaching assistant: Abigail “Abby” Lehner, a third-year doctoral candidate in the lab of pollination ecologist Neal Williams.

“Abigail did nearly all of the work helping the students this year and has a lot of expertise producing excellent entomology content for social media --she's on instagram and tiktok as @entomologyabby,” Vannette said “Huge kudos to her!”

“Neal Williams has co-taught the class with me in the past and I think he had the original idea for this assignment,” Vannette related. “But Abby raised the bar in terms of production value and the final products this year were excellent, in large part due to Abby!”

"Future classes can view them and also use them in developing their own videos,” Vannette said. “The produced videos can be used for educational purposes and are targeted toward a high school audience.”

The process: In groups, students picked a topic, researched it, wrote a script, crafted a storyboard, added the voiceover, and selected the graphics.

The 13 infomercials are online on YouTube.  Viewers can access the entire playlist, starting with the "Insect Golden Age" and ending with "Insect Mimicry," or single out a specific topic. 

The topics:

1. Carboniferous Era: Insect Golden Age 
2. Antarctic Midges 
3. Forensic Entomology 
4. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis: The Zombie Ant Fungus 
5. Fungus-Growing Ants
6. Insect Migration
7. Entomophagy or Consumption of Insects 
8. Jewel Wasp
9. Stingless Bees
10. Peppered Moths and Climate Change
11. Insect Sociality
12. Greater Bee Fly
13. Insect Mimicry

The ENT10 class is designed for non-entomology majors. It introduces students to insects “detailing their great variety, structures and functions, habits, and their significance in relation to plants and animals including man," according to the course description.

Biosketches

Abby Lehner. Lehner, who studies landscape ecology, pollinator conservation, solitary bees and global change, specializes in how global change impacts solitary bees.  “For my dissertation work, I am integrating variables across multiple spatial scales to understand how rapid environmental change affects reproduction and habitat selection in the blue orchard bee, Osmia lignaria,” she says. Her previous research focused primarily on bee community ecology. "Throughout my master's, I studied how bee diversity and community composition changed over time at Pinnacles National Park. During my bachelor's, I monitored and compared bee communities in native and restored habitats at the Albany Pine Bush Preserve.”

Rachel Vannette. Vannette,  a UC Davis Chancellor's Fellow, is an international leader in microbial ecology, studying interactions between plants, insects and microbes. She received her doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Michigan, in 2011. Vannette joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology in September of 2015 from Stanford University, where she was a postdoctoral fellow. The Vannette lab is a team of entomologists, microbiologists, chemical ecologists, and community ecologists studying how microbial communities affect plants and insects. 

Geoffrey Attardo. Attardo is a global expert on vectorborne diseases, and renowned for his groundbreaking work on tsetse flies. He holds a doctorate in genetics (2004) from Michigan State University, studying with  Alexander Raikhel. Attardo joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology in 2017 from the Yale School of Public Health, where he served as a research scientist studying the reproductive biology of tsetse flies.  He received the Medical, Urban, and Veterinary Entomology Award in 2022 from the Pacific Branch, Entomological Society of America. (See news story)

The UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology is one of the nation's highest-ranking entomology departments.  Professor Joanna Chiu, molecular geneticist and physiologist, serves as the chair.