Congratulations to pollination ecologist Neal Williams, professor with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

He's a newly selected Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, a group of world-class scientists known for their scientific impact or outstanding contributions.

Candidates are nominated by Fellows. Williams was nominated by James R. Carey, distinguished professor of entomology, and seconded by Claire Kremen of the University of British Columbia, formerly of UC Berkeley.

In his letter of nomination, Carey wrote that Williams is “widely known and respected for his excellence in research, extension, outreach, teaching and leadership” and “is not only one of the stars of our campus, and the UC system, but is an internationally recognized leader in pollination and bee biology and strong voice in the development of collaborative research on insect ecology. He has organized national and international conferences, leads scores of working groups, and guides reviews of impacts of land use and other global change drivers on insects and the ecosystem services they provide.”

Williams is one of 13 Fellows in the Class of 2019, which also includes UC Davis physician Emanual Maverakis of the UC Davis School of Medicine's Department of Dermatology, nominated by Walter Leal, distinguished professor,  UC Davis Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. The Fellows will be inducted at the organization's annual meeting and gathering on Oct. 15.  The academy, a scientific and educational institution based in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, is dedicated to exploring, explaining, and sustaining life on earth. The Fellows extend the academy's impact on research, public engagement, and education.  

Williams' research spans the ecology and evolution of bees and other pollinating insects and their interactions with flowering plants. “He has become a leading voice for pollinator diversity and conservation in the California and The West,” wrote Carey. “One focus of his work has been in understanding the responses of bees to different environmental drivers and developing practical, scientifically grounded actions to support resilient pollinator communities. These efforts are particularly timely given concern over the global decline in bees and other pollinators.”

The UC Davis professor serves as co-chair (with Extension apiclturist Elina Lastro Niño) of 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. 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. (Yes, there's still time to register!)

 In his work--a labor of love--Williams seeks and finds found common solutions for sustaining both wild and managed bees and communicates that information to the public and stakeholder groups. Said Carey: “This is a critical perspective in natural and agricultural lands, but also in urban landscapes in northern and southern California.”

Each year the UC Davis professor speaks to multiple beekeeper, farmer and gardener groups, and provides guidance to governing bodies, including the state legislature, and environmental groups. He and his lab are involved in a newly initiated California Bombus assessment project (https://calibombus.com/), which is using both museum and citizen scientist records to understand past, current and future distributions and habitat use by bumble bees. This program will host a series of workshops this spring and summer open to practitioners and the public.

Williams received his doctorate in ecology and evolution in 1999 from the State University of New York, Stony Brook and served as an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at Bryn Mawr (Penn.) College from 2004 to 2009. He joined the UC Davis faculty in 2009, advancing to full professor in 2017.

His honors and awards are many. Williams was part of the UC Davis Bee Team that won the Team Research Award from the Pacific Branch, Entomological Society of America (PBESA) in 2013. In 2015, he was named a five-year Chancellor's Fellow, receiving $25,000 to support his research, teaching and public service activities. And then earlier this year, Williams received PBESA's Plant-Insect Ecosystems Award, presented annually for outstanding accomplishments in the study of insect interrelationships with plants. 

Williams also holds a three-year visiting professorship to the Swedish Agricultural University in Uppsala. The award is to lead work in sustainable agriculture, focusing in integrating multiple ecosystem services.

In addition to Carey, five others affiliated with UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology are Fellows of the California Academy of Sciences:

• Professor Phil Ward
• Frank Zalom, distinguished professor of entomology and a past president of the Entomological Society of America
• Robert E. Page Jr., distinguished emeritus professor, former chair of the department and provost emeritus  of Arizona State University
• Walter Leal, distinguished professor and a former chair of the entomology department (he is now with the UC Davis Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology) and
• Visiting scientist Catherine Tauber, formerly of Cornell University.

Former Fellows from the UC Davis entomology department include Robbin Thorp (1933-2019), distinguished emeritus professor of entomology, and visiting scientist Maurice Tauber (1931-2014), formerly of Cornell University.

Insects played a key role in the recent awards announced by the international Association for Communication Excellence in Agriculture, Natural Resources and Life and Human Sciences (ACE).

Five entomology-related entries from UC Davis won awards. They involved an administrative tour of the Bohart Museum of Entomology; the publication of the first-ever Bohart Museum calendar; "Bee Man" Norm Gary, UC Davis emeritus professor of entomology; the UC Davis Picnic Day performance of "The Entomology Band" comprised of UC Davis graduate students; and an image of a honey bee covered with mustard pollen.

The piece on the Bohart tour chronicled the visit of UC Davis Chancellor Gary May and Dean Helene Dillard of the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Director Lynn Kimsey, UC Davis professor of entomology, discussed the teaching, education and public service underway at the museum, home of nearly eight million insect specimens, plus a gift shop and live "petting zoo."

Chancellor May and Dean Dillard expressed a strong interest in the science: the specimens, scientists and research. But the live petting zoo containing Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks (stick insects) and tarantulas? Not so much.

The news coverage, however, scored a gold award (first place) in the ACE competition. Judges lauded the  coverage by yours truly (Kathy Keatley Garvey, communications specialist, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology), as "great work, nice coverage" but commented that the chancellor and dean weren't too "keen on interacting with the insects." (No, they did not ask to cuddle a cockroach!)

The award was one of 10 that communicators affiliated with UC Davis will receive at the ACE conference set June 24-27 in San Antonio, Texas. 

Communications coordinator Steve Elliott of the Western Integrated Pest Management Center won four awards, including two golds:

• A gold award for writing for the web for his "Preparing for the Invasion: Emerald Ash Borer in Colorado"  (See entry: https://bit.ly/2YBaRTT)
• A gold award for writing within a specialized publications for “Learning to Manage – and Live with – Coyotes in Southern California.” (See entry: https://bit.ly/2LLFjZY)
• A silver award (second place) for the  center's electronic newsletter, highlighting integrated pest management research, issues, funding opportunities, jobs and meetings each month. Issues available at (See entry: https://bit.ly/2M5mL6s)
• A bronze award (third place), with Will Suckow, for the Western IPM Center website (www.westernipm.org)

Science writer Gregory Watry of the College of Biological Sciences won a silver award  in the promotional writing category for his story, ‘Feeding the Future: Growing Stronger Crops.” (Entry: https://bit.ly/2vZYZyz)

Kathy Keatley Garvey also won several other entomology-related awards:

• A silver award for a feature photo of a honey bee covered with mustard pollen. (Entry: https://bit.ly/2I82fi2)
• A bronze award (third place) for "The Bee Man" newspaper story on Norm Gary, emeritus professor of entomology, book author, and retired bee wrangler (Entry: https://bit.ly/2w3yW9m)
• A bronze award for writing within a specialized publication.  "Bugs and Beats," published in Entomology Today, a publication of the Entomological Society of America, featured "The Entomology Band" of UC Davis graduate students (Entry: https://bit.ly/2JHIfEa)
• A bronze award for the Bug Squad blog, "When Queen Bees Get Permanents," showcasing the art of Karissa Merritt, UC Davis entomology student, in a Bohart Museum calendar and the humorous writings of students  in Lynn Kimsey classes (Entry: https://bit.ly/2BWV7Ch)

 ACE, headquartered in Morton Grove, Ill., and founded in 1913, is a non-profit international association of communications, educators and information technologists.

Got milk? Got a question about tsetse flies?

Yes? Then you'll want to attend the Science Café presentation on Wednesday, June 7, when medical entomologist and tsetse expert Geoffrey Attardo of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology will discuss “Got Milk? The Evolution and Biology of the Lactation in the Tsetse Fly.”

The event, set  for 5:30 p.m., in the G Street Wunderbar, 228 G St., Davis, Calif., is free and open to the public.  Jared Shaw of the UC Davis College of Letters and Science will host the presentation.

“It is actually going to be a very basic talk aimed at lay audiences and kids,” Attardo says. “I'll be talking about my background, how I became an entomologist and how I ended up working on tsetse flies. Then I am going to discuss the life history of tsetse flies, where they can be found, why they are of medical importance and how their reproductive biology differs so dramatically from other flies that people are familiar with. My plan is to go over their reproductive cycle, how they develop intrauterine larvae, the reproductive adaptations that allow them to perform this feat and then go over what we know about tsetse milk secretions and how they compare to mammalian milk in terms of nutritional content.” 

“The aim is for it to be very informal, with very little scientific jargon and to be discussion-oriented so that there is lots of questions and answers. I am also bringing some items from the lab that can be passed around the audience for show and tell (homemade tsetse cages, the blood feeding system we use to feed the flies and some tsetse flies preserved in alcohol).

Attardo focuses his research on numerous aspects of the physiology of tsetse fly reproduction, with the goal to identify and understand key aspects of its reproductive biology. He joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology in 2017 from the Yale University School of Public Health, New Haven, Conn., where he researched tsetse flies in the lab of Serap Aksoy.

Attardo considers the tsetse fly "one of the champions of the insect world." 

 "In addition to being vectors of a deadly disease, Trypanosomiasis, these flies have undergone amazing alterations to their physiology relative to other insects," he says. "Some examples of this are their ability feed exclusively on blood, their obligate relationship with a bacterial symbiont, the fact that they lactate and that they give birth to fully developed larval offspring."

If you'd like scientific information on tsetse fly lactation, see Adenotrophic Viviparity in Tsetse Flies: Potential for Population Control and as an Insect Model for Lactation, co-authored by Attardo and published in January 2015 in the Annual Review of Entomology.

The UC Davis scientist was featured in a New York Times' article on tsetse flies on Feb. 12. Pulitzer-Prize winning science writer Natalie Angier penned the article, "Everywhere in the Animal Kingdom, Followers of the Milky Way" (subhead: "As scientists learn more about milk's evolution and compositional variations, they are redefining what used to be a signature characteristic of mammals.")

"Most female flies take a low-rent approach to parenthood, depositing scores of seed-sized eggs in the trash or on pet scat to hatch, leaving the larvae to fend for themselves," Angier wrote.  "Not so the female tsetse fly. She gestates her young internally, one at a time, and gives birth to them live. When each extravagantly pampered offspring pulls free of her uterus after nine days, fly mother and child are pretty much the same size."

Then she quoted Attardo: “It's the equivalent of giving birth to an 18-year-old."

Attardo is also a talented macro photographer. He won the 2010 Fogarty Grantee Photo Contest with an image of a tsetse fly. The Yale School of Public Health magazine featured his images on “An Eye for the Tsetse Fly.” The Los Angeles Times published his remarkable video (in 2014) of a tsetse fly giving birth.  Also, see his portraits of the tsetse fly on Live Science, published in 2014.

Remember that massive green blob that showed up Tuesday night, June 4 on the National Weather Service (NWS) radar in San Diego, and NWS tweeted it was a “a cloud of ladybugs (termed a bloom)”?

Wait! They may NOT have been ladybugs, scientifically known as lady beetles, family Coccinellidae.

“I'm still not convinced that the swarms are ladybugs,” Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology at UC Davis, told us Friday. “It's pretty late in the season for them and apparently there's no hard evidence for ladybugs except anecdotes that folks have seen a lot of ladybugs in the region. We were seeing a lot of ladybugs in the Imperial Dunes when we were there in March.”

Scientists spotted the cloud, about 10 miles wide and a mile above the ground around 9 p.m.   They ruled out bats and birds. The temperature in the air? About 40 degrees or lower—considered too cold for ladybugs.

“Forty degrees is too cold for their flight muscles, but if there's a wind and they've already warmed up, it's possible they could stay airborne,” Kimsey said, adding she'd like to see some hard evidence that these were indeed ladybugs. “Otherwise this is all just speculation.”

The ladybugs were thought to be the migratory convergent lady beetles, Hippodamia convergens. Some 200 species of ladybugs reside in California. (See information on this beetle on the UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program website.)

Kimsey says ladybugs typically migrate from the mountains toward the coast in early spring, and vice versa in the fall. “This is a bit later than usual but it's probably because of the weird cold, wet spring we've been having.”

Speculation abounds. Why the huge swarm? Maybe it was the result of a combination of cues, such as temperatures and length of day, climate change (wildfires?), and lack of food?  A perfect storm?

Kimsey told reporter Maanvi Singh of The Guardian in a June 7th news story: “It's too bad there wasn't anyone in a private plane up in the air at that time. We could've figured it out based on which dead insects were splatted across the wings.””

Kimsey knows about those bug splats. She was the nation's only entomologist selected for the NASA SPLAT/Boeing team to research how to decrease bug splats on aircraft and thus increase fuel efficiency in commercial jets. NASA engineers developed four different surface treatments designed to repel bugs and Boeing developed wing modifications to test an aircraft at Shreveport, La.

By the way, a Boeing EcoDemonstrator 575 took flight, reaching an altitude of 5000 feet to maximize bug splats. The panels generated 100 and 500 splats each. Kimsey identified all the insects and found that a relatively small number of species caused the bulk of the splats. They included flower flies, aphids, thrips, muscid flies, midges, mosquitoes and love bugs. Kimsey's excellence in teaching, research and public service led to her being named the 2016 recipient of the Academic Senate's Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award and a comment from her nominators that her SPLAT research was a "great public service to NASA, the airline industry and worldwide passengers who depend on air travel."

Naturalist Greg Kareofelas, an associate at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, has never seen such a cloud but has photographed lady beetles overwintering in California's Coast Range. "When they are at the place they will spend the winter, they hide under leaves and other detritus and unless you dig down to the ground level, you don't really see them or notice they are there. I guess this is the way they are protected from the cold. I know the places I have found them are under snow for the winter. It is only when they are ready to disperse in the spring, do they congregate like on tree trunks and other places above ground level."

UC Davis emeritus professor Hugh Dingle, author of Migration: The Biology of Life on the Move (second edition, 2014, Oxford University Press), a sequel to the first edition published in 1996, says the cloud may have been lady beetles. "I guess lady beetles, but I suspect other insects were in the swarm as well."

"This one was especially large, but yes, there have been other swarms showing up on radars, especially locusts, some moths," Dingle said. "Could also have been moths, grasshoppers, etc. I confess, though, that the swarm was so large that I wonder if there was a glitch somewhere on the radar or something?"

Now if there had just been a plane near that cloud, as Kimsey pointed out, we'd have known exactly what was in that swarm.

Birds, bats, bloom? Unidentified objects?

Splat! Identified objects.