- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's Arachtober and that means celebrating arachnids for the entire month of October.
Well, we ought to celebrate them year around, but October is THEIR month.
Let's especially applaud crab spiders when they prey on such agricultural pests as the lygus bug, also known as the "western tarnished plant bug." It's a member of the genus Lygus in the family Miridae and feeds on plants by piercing the plant tissues.
The lygus bug is easily distinguished by the triangular mark on its back.
The western tarnished plant bug (Lygus hesperus) is known as a very serious pest of cotton, strawberries and seed crops such as alfalfa, entomologists tell us. In California alone, the bug causes $30 million in damage to cotton plants each year, "and at least $40 million in losses to the state's strawberry industry," according to Wikipedia.
"Lygus bugs are one of the causes of irregularly shaped, cat-faced strawberries; another cause may be poor pollination, which results in small undeveloped seeds," says UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program (UC IPM) in its Pest Management Guidelines. "Lygus bugs damage fruit by puncturing individual seeds; this, in turn, stops development of the berry in the area surrounding the feeding site. Straw-colored seeds that are large and hollow are a good indication of lygus bug damage. Lygus bug damage is more of a problem in strawberry-growing areas where continuous fruit production occurs.
"Adults are about 0.25 inch (6 mm) long, oval, and rather flattened," UC IPM points out. "They are greenish or brownish and have reddish-brown markings on their wings."
So what happens when a crab spider nails a lygus bug?
The cheering section is loud.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Her Oct. 7th seminar was recorded. You can access it via Aggie Videos on the ENT website at https://entomology.ucdavis.edu/seminars. Here's the direct link.
Her topic: "Don't Compromise: Food Lipid Contest Shapes Protein-Lipid Regulation in Honey Bee (Apis melliera) Nurses," which she delivered in Room 122 of Briggs and also on Zoom.
Posada was introduced by apiculturist Elina Lastro Niño, associate professor of Cooperative Extension and founder and director of the California Master Beekeeper Program.
Posada began her talk by noting that one of the hot topics of honey bee research is nutrition. She went on to explain what bees need and the research her team is doing.
Her abstract: "Regulating nutrient intake is a fundamental and multidimensional challenge for all animals. Typically, animals prioritize macronutrient intake, and we know much about protein-carbohydrate regulation. In contrast, we know relatively little about protein-lipid regulation, especially among palynivores like bees that feed on food (pollen) that has high, but variable, protein and lipid content."
"Using a Geometric Framework or nutrition experimental approach, we show that nurse honey bees (Apis melliera) maximized their protein-lipid intake on diets that had a 3:2 protein:lipid ratio and that it was lowest on highly lipid-based diets. In choice experiments with nutritionally complementary diets, bees self-selected a protein-based diet. However, total consumption was suppressed when a lipid-biased food was present. Our collective results suggest bees actively regular the intake of both protein and lipid, but that lipid regulation is particularly strict. Our findings have implications for honey bee and palynivore ecology, and nutritional ecology more broadly."
All ENT seminars recorded will appear at https://entomology.ucdavis.edu/seminars. The first speaker in the fall series was Kyle Wickings of Cornell, who spoke Sept. 30 on "Composition and Function of Soil Invertebrate Communities in Residential Greenspaces." The direct link to his seminar is here.
The fall seminars begin Monday afternoon, Sept. 30 and will continue every Monday through Dec. 2.
Nematologist Amanda Hodson, assistant professor of soil ecology and pest management, is coordinating the seminars. All, except one, will be held in 122 Briggs Hall. All, but one (Nov. 18), will be on Zoom. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672.
Here's the remaining schedule:
Monday, Oct. 14, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Thomas and Nina Leigh Distinguished Alumni Award Seminar, Putah Creek Lodge
Michael Hoffmann
Professor Emeritus, Cornell University
Title: “Our Changing Menu: Using the Power of Food to Confront Climate Change”
This will take place beginning at 4 p.m. in the Putah Creek Lodge and will include a social, lecture and dinner. Reservations are closed, but his seminar will be recorded and archived. (See more)
Monday, Oct. 21, 4:10 to 5 p.m.,122 Briggs
Andrew Corbett
Research Affiliate, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology (formerly with the lab of UC Davis distinguished professor Jay Rosenheim, now emeritus)
Title: "In Silico Experiments with the Effect of Natural Habitats on Biological Control in Agricultural Landscapes."
Monday, Oct. 28, 4:10 to 5 p.m., 122 Briggs
Jolene Saldivar
UC Davis Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow, lab of Professor Louie Yang
Title: "Disturbance in Coastal Sage Scrub and the Implications for Migratory Butterflies”
Monday, Nov. 4, 4:10 to 5 p.m., 122 Briggs
Eliza Litsey (exit seminar)
Litsey, a former graduate student in the honey bee lab of Elina Niño, UC Davis Department of Entomology, received her master's degree in entomology in June 2024 and is now a laboratory technician at the lab of research entomologist Julia Fine, USDA/ARS, Davis. Litzey also holds a bachelor's degree from UC Davis.)
Monday, Nov. 18, 122 Briggs (in-person only; will not on Zoom)
Andre Custodio Franco
Assistant Professor, Indiana University Bloomington
Title: "Deciphering the Soil Macrobiome: Belowground Communities Driving Ecosystem Responses to Global Change”
Monday, Nov. 25, 4:10 to 5 p.m., 122 Briggs
Christine Sprunger
Associate Professor of Soil Health at Michigan State University
Title: "Nematodes as Bioindicators of Soil Health and Climate Resiliency”
Monday, Dec. 2, 4:10 to 5 p.m., 122 Briggs
Inga Zasada
Research Plant Pathologist, USDA-ARS
Title: "How an Applied Nematolgist Uses Genomic Tools to Address Plant-Parasitic Nematode Research”
For more information contact Hodson at akhodson@ucdavis.edu
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
What an incredible story!
It all began with insects and an entomology graduate student's curiosity of how caterpillars turn into butterflies.
Bruce Hammock, now a UC Davis distinguished professor who holds a joint appointment with the Department of Entomology and Nematology and the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, remembers studying juvenile hormones in the UC Berkeley lab of John Casida back in the 1970s.
He and fellow graduate student Sarjeet Gill, now a UC Riverside distinguished professor emeritus, co-discovered that a key enzyme in the metamorphosis degrades a caterpillar's juvenile hormone, allowing it to move from the larval stage into an adult insect.
So, for the past 50 years, Hammock has been researching inhibitors of soluble epoxide hydrolase or sEH. Those inhibitors alleviate chronic pain and inflammation in experimental animals. That research has led to experimental drugs that target such diseases as diabetes, hypertension (heart disease), Alzheimer's disease, and cancer.
Hammock's curiosity may lead to this: patients suffering from chronic pain and inflammation may be able to take a non-narcotic to alleviate that pain.
Flashback to 2011: Hammock and UC Davis alumna and pharmacologist-toxicologist Cindy McReynolds co-founded EicOsis (pronounced eye-co-sis) in 2011.The Davis-based company recently completed testing a drug candidate in Phase 1 human clinical trials with their lead candidate EC5026 that inhibits sEH. “Inhibiting sEH increases the levels of naturally occurring inflammation resolving and pain-relieving compounds,” Hammock said. “The clinical trial showed no side effects.”
Fast Forward to Today: The company, EicOsis has been named one of Pepperdine Graziadio Business School's 2024 Most Fundable Companies. EicOsis s one of 18 recipients from a competitive pool of more than 2000 U.S. startups and notable in being a pharmacology company. The seventh annual list features companies from diverse sectors, including FinTech, AgTech, Healthcare, Industrial Automation, Consumer Packaged Goods, and Advanced Materials.
“At EicOsis, our mission is to develop new effective and safe oral medicines to help people suffering from pain and inflammation,” said McReynolds. “We are committed to improving the lives of those suffering from pain, helping them feel themselves again.”
EicOsis derives its name from eicosanoid, “the major backbone of chemical mediators in the arachidonate cascade,” said McReynolds. “It symbolizes the epoxide group in chemistry, which is key to the anti-inflammatory chemical mediators and where the biochemical target called soluble epoxide hydrolase works.”
“Chronic pain affects 100 million Americans alone, and the increased prescription of opioids has led to a widespread public health emergency, the U.S. Opioid Crisis,” Hammock said. “Our company seeks to meet the unmet need for safe, non-addictive and effective pain medications that can help pain patients and fight the opioid crisis.”
In the United States alone, more than 81,000 people died of opioid overdose deaths in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and more than 2.1 million people are addicted. The Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative, or NIH HEAL Initiative reports that the opioid epidemic In the 1990s, was "fueled by widespread overprescribing of opioids for pain management. This situation has led to significant reductions in appropriate opioid prescribing for pain at a time when safer and effective pain management strategies are not available to millions of Americans who live with pain.”
EicOsis won the “Sacramento Region Innovator of the Year” in 2019 in the medical health/biopharmaceutical category.
Long and Productive Road. It's been a long but productive road for Hammock, born in Little Rock, Ark., in 1947. Hammock earned a bachelor's degree in entomology magna cum laude, with minors in zoology and chemistry from Louisiana State University in 1969, and his doctorate in entomology/toxicology from UC Berkeley in 1973. A postdoctoral fellowship in biochemistry followed at the Rockefeller Foundation, Department of Biology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.
He also served active duty as a medical officer with U.S. Army Academy of Health Sciences, San Antonio, where he witnessed the depths of acute and chronic pain.
"The frustration of seeing the effects of terrible pain coupled with the inability to effectively treat it has led me on a life-long quest to address pain and related illnesses,” said Hammock. “The study of this enzyme and the natural mediators it regulates has the added benefit of providing deeper understanding of diseases from heart failure to Alzheimer's which in turn is leading to new treatments.”
Since joining the UC Davis faculty in 1980, Hammock has taught a variety of subjects through the years, including biochemistry, endocrinology, toxicology, and pharmaceutical discovery and developmental biology.
As Wikipedia says: "Dr. Hammock continually moves between fundamental research and its application. Amongst his many research endeavors, he found a key hydrolytic enzyme that controlled insect metamorphosis and exploited this by developing transition state inhibitors that altered insect development. Then he used this hydrolytic enzyme in a transgenic viral insecticide. He found another hydrolytic enzyme important in insect development that also controlled key biological functions in mammals. His laboratory developed transition state inhibitors of this enzyme as well, which are used in human clinical trials where they reduce pain and inflammation. In addition, his lab pioneered immunoassay techniques for analyzing both humans and environmental exposure to pesticides and other contaminants. He continues as an internationally recognized figure in these fields for over five decades and has published over 1300 papers."
Highly honored by his peers, Hammock is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, which honors academic invention and encourages translations of inventions to benefit society. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the Entomological Society of America, and the recipient of the Bernard B. Brodie Award in Drug Metabolism, sponsored by the America Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. He directed the campuswide NIEHS Superfund Research Program, National Institutes of Health Biotechnology Training Program for almost 40 years and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Combined Analytical Laboratory.
Cindy McReynolds. “As co-founder, Cindy has played a key role building EicOsis into a leader in therapeutics targeting sEH,” Hammock said in a UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology article. "Cindy's scientific insight, drive, and commitment ideally positions her to take EicOsis to the next level and builds on the vast body of science validating our approach. I know Cindy will continue to deliver great results for EicOsis and for a great many patients."
McReynolds received a bachelor's degree (1999) in animal science from UC Davis and a master's degree (2001) in animal science from Washington State University (WSU). Her career advanced from senior research associate, Celera (formerly Axys) in South San Francisco to senior associate scientist of Miikana, Fremont, to project coordinator of Arete Therapeutics, South San Francisco, to UC Davis researcher and EicOsis CEO.
At UC Davis, she served as the scientific program manager (2010-2017) for the Center for Integrative Toxicology, and as a graduate student researcher. She won a UC Davis Staff Assembly Citation of Excellence in Research in 2021. She earlier received the UC Davis 1999 Outstanding Senior Award, and several awards from WSU: the 2000 Dr. Erb Outstanding Graduate Student Award; the 2001 Teaching Assistant of the Year, and the 2001 Outstanding Graduate Student. While a graduate student, she was supported by a National Institutes of Health Chemical Biology Training Grant.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's October and Arachtober: the month to celebrate spiders and other arachnids.
As arachnologists will tell you, arachnids are arthropods that include spiders, scorpions, ticks, mites, pseudoscorpions, harvestmen, camel spiders, whip spiders and vinegaroons.
Arachnids need love, too, especially in October when spiders compete with ghosts, goblins and ghouls for your attention.
Meanwhile, scientists and arachnid fans are posting their favorite eight-legged images on their websites and social media.
Even Flickr celebrates Arachtober via a photography pool formed in September 2008. "The pool is open! Thanks everyone for participating, spreading the spider love, and making this fun!...This group is similar to a 365 group, the goal is to post spiders to Flickr daily during October. When you shot them is less important...Post what you have. You can either post them daily till you run out, spread them out every few days, or save them till Halloween week for Spider Blitz. Spiders are especially popular around then."
His five good reasons to love spiders?
- Spiders consume 400-800 million tons of prey, mostly insects, each year. Humans consume somewhere around 400 million tons of meat and fish each year.
- Spider silk is one of the strongest naturally occurring materials. Spider silk is stronger than steel, stronger and more stretchy than Kevlar; a pencil thick strand of spider silk could be used to stop a Boeing 747 in flight.
- Some spiders are incredibly fast – able to run up to 70 body lengths per second (10X faster than Usain Bolt).
- Although nearly all 47,000-plus spider species have venom used to kill their insect prey, very few actually have venom that is harmful to humans.
- Some spiders are really good parents –wolf spider moms carry their young on their backs until they are ready to strike out on their own; female trapdoor spiders keep their broods safe inside their burrows often longer than one year, and some female jumping spiders even nurse their spiderlings with a protein rich substance comparable to milk.
Happy Arachtober! Here are three jumping spiders that you can love, or try to love....Then on March 14 you celebrate Save a Spider Day.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
An international leader in honey bee research--Juliana Rangel Posada--will speak on "Don't Compromise: Food Lipid Content Shapes Protein-Lipid Regulation in Honey Bee (Apis Mellifera) Nurses" at 4:10 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 7 in 122 Briggs Hall. Her seminar also will be broadcast on Zoom. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672.
Can't attend or Zoom in? Her seminar will be archived on the Entomology and Nematology seminar website at https://entomology.ucdavis.edu/seminars.
"Regulating nutrient intake is a fundamental and multidimensional challenge for all animals," Posada says in her abstract. "Typically, animals prioritize macronutrient intake, and we know much about protein-carbohydrate regulation. In contrast, we know relatively little about protein-lipid regulation, especially among palynivores like bees that feed on food (pollen) that has high, but variable, protein and lipid content."
"Using a Geometric Framework or nutrition experimental approach, we show that nurse honey bees (Apis melliera) maximized their protein-lipid intake on diets that had a 3:2 protein:lipid ratio and that it was lowest on highly lipid-based diets," she continued. "In choice experiments with nutritionally complementary diets, bees self-selected a protein-based diet. However, total consumption was suppressed when a lipid-biased food was present. Our collective results suggest bees actively regular the intake of both protein and lipid, but that lipid regulation is particularly strict. Our findings have implications for honey bee and palynivore ecology, and nutritional ecology more broadly."
Posada joined the TAMU College of Agriculture and Life Sciences faculty in January 2013. She is active in the Texas Beekeepers Association and has addressed dozens of beekeeping associations across the United States and internationally.
Posada and her research group at Texas A&M found that a widely used pesticide—the miticide amitraz—used to protect honey bees from mite infestation, has an effect on mating among the queens. (See Entomology Today, a publication of the Entomological Society of America)
She's also an outstanding teacher, the recipient of TAMU awards and the 2023 Excellence Achievement Award in Teaching, Southwestern Branch of the Entomological Society of America.
Nematologist Amanda Hodson, assistant professor, is coordinating the ENT seminars. The full list is here. For more information or for technical issues, contact Hodson at akhodson@ucdavis.edu.
Resources:
- Interview with a Social Insect Scientist, published in 2017 by Insectessociaux
- Biology of Mating, National Honey Show Lecture Series 2015, YouTube
- Bee Happy: Maximizing Honey Bee Characteristics for Health Bees, Finding Genus Podcast
- Posada lab Facebook page: facebook.com/TAMUhoneybeelab
