Seeing spots--one of the t-shirts available at the Bohart Museum. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

The Bohart Museum, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane,  is open to the public Mondays through Thursdays except on holidays. It will be closed Dec. 21 through Jan. 6.

It's directed by Lynn Kimsey, professor of entomology at UC Davis.

Here are some of the ways you can think entomological!

• Donate to the Bohart Museum Society.  Thanks to public support last year, "we have created internships for high school students, expanding our K-12 outreach programs, incorporated newly donated collections of beetles and butterflies and have two awesome imaging systems that have made it possible for us to provide Bohart Museum scientists and visiting researchers with high quality images of insects in our collections," related Kimsey. "We have big plans for the coming year and your continue support will make it possible for us to add a second session to our summer camp for junior high students, train undergraduate and graduate students in entomology and educational outreach, continue to improve our website, and educate the public about insects, spiders and their relatives."
  
  Bohart Museum membership categories include individual ($25), student ($15), student families ($25), family ($40), patron ($100) and additional donations. Checks can be made out to the Bohart Museum Society, c/o Bohart Museum of Entomology, Room 1124 Academic Surge Building, One Shields Ave., Davis, CA 95616. There's also a museum BioLegacy sponsorship ($2000 and up) that enables you to name an insect after yourself or a loved one.
  
  
  

  Entomologist Fran Keller, former graduate student at UC Davis and now an assistant professor at Folsom Lake College, with her book, "The Story of the Dogface Butterfly." Photographer Greg Kareofelas and artist Laine Bauer illustrated it. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
  Calendars. For donations of $50 or more, the Bohart will provide you with its 2019 calendar illustrated by entomology student/artist Karissa Merritt and featuring her humorous interpretations of actual sentences from term papers in Professor Kimsey's classes. Example, regarding mayflies: "The swarmers are attracted to lights and tend to expose themselves in the evenings.” (See illustration below.) It also acknowledges the birthdates of famous entomologists.  The calendar is  available separately for $12, plus tax.
  
  
• Peruse the Bohart Museum gift shop, which includes insect-themed t-shirts and sweatshirts, graced with everything from monarch butterflies to Hercules beetles to lady beetles (ladybugs) and dragonflies. You'll also find in the gift shop: insect-themed books, jewelry, posters and candy, plus insect-collecting equipment.
  
  Books in the gift shop include The Story of the Dogface Butterfly, a 35-page children's book authored by Fran Keller, former doctoral student at the Bohart Museum, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and  now assistant professor at Folsom Lake College. It includes illustrations by  former UC Davis student Laine Bauer and photographs by Bohart associate Greg Kareofelas and Keller. The California dogface butterfly is the state insect.
  
  Plush toys in the gift shop include tardigrades (much in demand), bedbugs and flies.
  
  Posters include the California dogface butterfly, the work of Bohart associates Fran Keller and Greg Kareofelas.
  
  Butterfly habitats, zippered and netted, are perfect for rearing monarchs, Gulf Fritillaries and other butterflies.

In addition, the Bohart Museum is a good place to see, photograph and hold many of the occupants in its live "petting zoo," which includes Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks, tarantulas, and praying mantids.

The Bohart Museum's regular hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. It is closed to the public on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and on major holidays. Admission is free.  For more information, access the website or Facebook page or email bmuseum@ucdavis.edu or telephone (530) 753-0493.

Jessica Gillung won the prize for best student presentation at the recent 9th International Congress of Dipterology in Windhoek, Namibia.

Her research already has.

She just won the prize for best student presentation at the recent 9th International Congress of Dipterology in Windhoek, Namibia.

Gillung delivered her presentation on “Phylogenetic Relationships of Spider Flies (Acroceridae) – Discordance, Uncertainty and the Perils of Phylogenomics.” Acrocerid adults are floral visitors, and some are specialized pollinators, while the larvae are internal parasitoids of spiders.

Approximately 350 delegates attended the conference; the scientists focus on the Diptera order, which includes houseflies, mosquitoes, and gnats. Gillung was among 40 students presenting their research.

Gillung studies with major professor Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology; mentor Shaun Winterton of the California Department of Food and Agriculture; and collaborator Phil Ward, UC Davis professor of entomology.

UC Davis doctoral students Charlotte Herbert Alberts and Socrates Letana, who both study with Kimsey, also presented their work; Alberts delivered an oral presentation on her research (she studies Asilidae (Assassin flies), and Letana displayed a poster on bot flies.

Presenting the award to Gillung was Professor Thomas Pape of the Natural History Museum of Denmark and chair of the Council for the International Congresses of Dipterology, which organizes the conferences. The next Congress takes place in 2022 in California.

In her abstract, Gillung described spider flies “as a monophyletic group of lower Brachycera currently classified into three subfamilies, 55 genera and ca 530 species.”

“The group has long been considered a rogue taxon and its placement within the Diptera tree of life remains uncertain,” she wrote. “Phylogenetic relationships among lineages of spider flies are by contrast relatively well established, with hypotheses proposed based on molecular data from both Sanger and high-throughput sequencing. Phylogenomic estimation of spider fly relationships yields different topologies, depending on whether data is coded and analyzed as nucleotides or as amino acids. The most significant difference among the two data types is in the monophyly of Panopinae; a morphologically and ecologically recognizable group, that is recovered as monophyletic only in the analyses of nucleotides. This study uses Acroceridae as a system to explore the effects of potential confounding factors in phylogenomic reconstruction. This research takes advantage of modern and powerful statistical approaches, including posterior predictive simulation, to understand the effects of conflict, uncertainty and systematic error in the estimation of evolutionary relationships using the standard phylogenomic toolkit.”

Fast forward to her exit seminar, which she will deliver at 2 p.m., Friday, Dec. 14 in 122 Briggs Hall, located off Kleiber Hall Drive. The title:  “Evolution of Fossil and Living Spider Flies (Diptera, Acroceridae): A Tale of Conflict and Uncertainty."

"Parasitoid flies," Gillung wrote in her abstract for her Dec. 14 seminar, "are some of the most remarkable, yet poorly known groups of insects. Represented by over 10,000 species distributed in 21 families, dipteran parasitoids comprise over 100 independent lineages, offering an unparalleled system to understanding the origin, evolution and diversification of the parasitoid life history. My dissertation research unraveled the systematics, evolution and biology of a lineage of dipteran parasitoids specialized in spiders, Acroceridae, commonly known as spider flies. My research resulted in a monograph of fossil spider flies, and a robust hypothesis for the pattern and timing of spider fly evolution based on high throughput sequencing. Through the combination of DNA sequence data obtained via Sanger sequencing with morphological characters, I also estimated their relationships among spider fly genera using an extensive taxon sampling which culminated in a new taxonomic classification for the family.”

Gillung has accepted a postdoctoral position at Cornell University, Ithaca, beginning Jan. 2. She will be working with Bryan Danforth on Apoidea (stinging wasps and bees) phylogenomics, evolution and diversification.

She recently was named the recipient of the prestigious 2018 Student Leadership Award, presented by the Pacific Branch, Entomological Society of America (PBESA), which represents 11 states, seven U.S. territories, and parts of Canada and Mexico.

 A native of Brazil, Jessica holds a bachelor's degree in biology from the Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil and a master's degree in zoology from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She speaks four languages fluently: Portuguese, Spanish, English and German.

Lynn Dicks, a keynote speaker

Christina Grozinger, a keynote speaker

Next July: a major occurrence in the world of pollinators:

UC Davis will host the seventh annual International Pollinator Conference, a four-day conference focusing on pollinator biology health and policy. It is set from Wednesday, July 17 through Saturday, July 20,  in the UC Davis Conference Center.

Co-chairing the event are pollination ecologist Neal Williams, professor of entomology, and Extension apiculturist Elina Lastro Niño, both of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

The conference, themed “Multidimensional Solutions to Current and Future Threats to Pollinator Health,” will cover a wide range of topics in pollinator research: from genomics to ecology and their application to land use and management; to breeding of managed bees; and to monitoring of global pollinator populations. Topics discussed will include recent research advances in the biology and health of pollinators, and their policy implications.

Keynote speakers are Christina Grozinger, distinguished professor of entomology and director of the Center for Pollinator Research, Pennsylvania State University, (the research center launched the annual pollinator conferences in 2012) and Lynn Dicks, Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Research Fellow, School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia, England.

Grozinger researches health and social behavior in bees and is developing comprehensive approaches to improving  pollinator health and reduce declines. Dicks, an internationally respected scientist, studies bee ecology and conservation. She received the 2017 John Spedan Lewis Medal for contributions to insect conservation.

Other speakers include:

• Claudio Gratton, professor, Department of Entomology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Quinn McFrederick, assistant professor, Department of Entomology, UC Riverside
• Scott McArt, assistant professor, Department of Entomology, Cornell University
• Maj Rundlöf, International Career Grant Fellow, Department of Biology, Lund University, Sweden
• Juliette Osborne, professor and chair, Applied Ecology, University of Exeter, England
• Maggie Douglas, assistant professor, Environmental Studies, Dickinson College

The UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center, directed by Amina Harris, is playing a major role in the international conference. The center's events manager, Elizabeth Luu, is serving as the conference coordinator. For more information on the conference, access the UC Davis Honey and Pollination website at https://honey.ucdavis.edu/pollinatorconference2019 and sign up for the newsletter for up-to-date information.

...Birds do it, bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
--Cole Porter

When Cole Porter wrote “Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love” in 1928, he wasn't thinking about butterflies. He was thinking of birds, bees and...well, educated fleas. As opposed to uneducated?

“The Birds and Bees” soon became a euphemism for courtship and reproduction. "The Talk."

Well, Cole Porter could have—should have--added "butterflies."

Monarch butterflies. Especially considering the dwindling number of overwintering monarchs along coastal California. 

According to a Dec. 8 article in The Guardian, in the 1980s some 4.5 million monarchs overwintered in California, but today the number has dropped to about 30,000. That's a drop of some 97 percent, The Guardian noted.

Earlier, on Nov. 30, the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation (which organizes the Thanksgiving count) reported:

"We currently have preliminary count results from 97 sites, which includes many of the most important overwintering sites. In 2017, these sites accounted for 77% of the total monarch overwintering population, hosting approximately 148,000 monarchs. In 2018, the same sites have only 20,456 monarchs. This represents an 86% decline since last year."

"We will not have final numbers until the count is over and all the data are in and vetted (usually late January)—and we will keep our fingers crossed that other sites are hosting more monarchs."

Speaking of The Birds and The Bees, when migrating monarchs from the Pacific Northwest and inland California were fluttering to coastal California--and some were just eclosing--we encountered a courtship in Vacaville, Calif.

The date: Sept. 29, 2018

The players:

• A bird: A metal sculpture nailed to a post.
• Bees: Dozens of honey bees foraging on Spanish lavender beneath the post
• Butterflies: Two monarchs, Danaus plexippus...well...getting acquainted.
• Educated Fleas: No where in sight. (No uneducated fleas in sight, either.)

Sadly, the statistics indicate--with or without educated fleas--a dismal spring for monarchs.