- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
UC Davis nematologist/parasitologist Lauren Camp gets asked that a lot.
In one word: "Worms."
Her display table last Sunday, Jan. 22 at the Bohart Museum of Entomology's "Parasite Palooza" open house drew dozens of fascinated visitors of all ages.
“Nematodes are an amazing phylum of organisms--they exist in almost every known environment on the planet, and different species eat everything from bacteria and fungi to plant and animal tissue," said Camp, who received her doctorate from UC Davis last December, studying with nematologist Steve Nadler, professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
"I find parasites particularly fascinating, because they are dependent on another organism (or organisms) for part or all of their life cycle."
Camp staffed the table from 1 to 4 p.m., enthusiastically answering all kinds of questions and talking about her displays, which included nematodes from the stomach of a Minke whale (specimen from the California Academy of Sciences), the heart of a dog (pointer) infected with heartworm, and a tomato plant with nematode-damaged roots.
"I got a lot of That's gross! and That's cool!" Camp recalled. "People were amazed by the whale stomach worms. Many were saddened by the dog heart infected with heartworm, but understood the importance of giving their dogs medication for heartworm."
Regarding heartworm (Dirofilaria immitis) in dogs, Camp pointed out that the parasite is transmitted to dogs through mosquito bites, and more than 70 mosquito species can transmit it. Dirofilaria immitis is distributed across the United States, although its prevalence is higher in some U.S. regions, she said. A good resource? Check out https://www.capcvet.org/capc-recommendations/canine-heartworm/, a website that also includes maps of prevalence in the U.S. from 2011 and 2012.
The tomato plant, infected with Meloidogyne incognita, came from postdoctoral fellow Rasa Cepulyte-Rakauskiene of the Valerie Williamson lab, UC Davis Department of Plant Pathology. "Meloidogyne species
Camp, who hails from rural northern Indiana, first became interested in parasites as an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago, where she received her bachelor's degree in biology in 2005. She went on to earn her master's degree in biology from Wake Forest University in 2007. "My specific interest in nematode parasites developed when I read some of Dr. Nadler's work on the evolutionary relationships of nematodes for an invertebrate biology class. Her career plans: a researcher in infectious diseases or genetics/genomics or as a science communicator.
Meanwhile, if you missed Camp's presentation at the Bohart Museum open house, not to worry. She's booked one more presentation this month and nematologists will table an event at the UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day.
Science Night Live Program: Camp will speak on "Nematode Need-to-Know: Roundworms Are All Around You” at the Science Night Live Program at 6 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 1 at the World of Wonders (WOW) Science Museum, 2 North Sacramento St., Lodi. The two-hour event is billed as a “conversation with the parasitologist.” She will display nematodes ranging in size from less than one millimeter to eight meters long, or 30 feet.
UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day. Nematologists Corwin Irwin and Chris Pagan, both graduate students, will discuss and show nematodes from noon to 4 p.m. in the Sciences Lab Building, UC Davis campus. This will be a part of 12 collections on display throughout the campus. The event, open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (some collections are open from 9 to noon, and some from 1 to 4 p.m.) will "showcase natural history, biodiversity and the cultural-ecological interface," according to Biodiversity Museum Day coordinator Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator for the Bohart Museum of Entomology. (See Bug Squad blog)
Camp also appeared Sunday, Jan. 22 on Good Day Sacramento's "Parasite Palooza" show with entomologist Jeff Smith, curator of the moth and butterfly specimens at the Bohart Museum of Entomology. They shared and showed specimens and live insects. Camp mentioned a 30-foot-long whale nematode. (See http://gooddaysacramento.cbslocal.com/video/category/spoken-word-good-day/3610653-parasite-palooza/) She also spoke Feb. 1 to Capital Public Radio. See http://www.capradio.org/88726.
"It's fun to talk about nematodes with the public," she said.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Have you ever asked Siri "How cold is it?"
Siri, a computer program known as Apple's "intelligent personal assistant" or "knowledge navigator," is part of Apple's Inc.'s iOS operating system. Folks usually ask Siri for directions. We ask about the weather AND directions.
So on Wednesday noon, Jan. 25, from our Vacaville "weather station," we picked up the Iphone and asked Siri: "How cold is it?'
"It's 53 degrees and I don't find that particularly cold," she said, maybe a little too fiesty. Siri is probably headquartered in Fairbanks, Alaska, where shivering residents experience -70 degrees in January. Or maybe she's based in Grand Forks or Fargo, N.D., where -40 degrees is considered a heat wave.
It's so cold in some of the cities in Alaska, North Dakota and Minnesota--how cold?--so cold that you have to open the refrigerator to heat the house. And, sometimes it's so cold that:
- you step outside and your shadow freezes
- you hear the police telling a robber to "freeze" and he does
- you bake a cake and set it out on the windowsill to cool and seconds later, it's frosted
- you talk to friends and your words freeze, so you have to pick up the letters and thaw them before continuing
- bees are begging to be smoked
So we walked outside to check the newly flowering oxalis for the presence of honey bees. Fifty-three degrees. Scientists tell us that honey bees don't usually fly when it's below 55 degrees, but we've seen bees flying at 50 degrees. So, between 50 and 55, that's a given.
The yellow oxalis seemed to be waiting. Any bees? Yes, one bee. She probably emerged from her hive, shivered a bit, and said to her fellow worker bees: "Let's go, girls!"--or something like that.
So we asked Siri "Do you like bees?"
"This is about you, Kathy, not me," she said.
Still feisty.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's sort of like the wonders of the world but this is a science-based event at UC Davis. Scheduled Saturday, Feb. 18, it's a special day for the public to go behind the scenes to see 12 collections and learn how scientists conduct research.
You'll gain first-hand knowledge. You'll see everything from honey bees to hawks, and from bugs to botanical displays.
The event, open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., will "showcase natural history, biodiversity and the cultural-ecological interface," said coordinator Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator for the Bohart Museum of Entomology.
The open house is free and open to all; parking is also free. All collections are within walking distance on campus except for the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven on Bee Biology Road for the Raptor Center on Old Davis Road, and
The following will be open from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.:
- Arboretum and Public Garden, headquartered on LaRue Road
- Bohart Museum of Entomology, Academic Surge Building
- California Raptor Center, Old Davis Road
- Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, Academic Surge Building
- Paleontology Collection, Earth and Physical Sciences Building
- Phaff Yeast Culture Collection, Earth and Physical Sciences Building
- Viticulture and Enology Culture Collection, Earth and Physical Sciences Building
The following will be open from noon to 4 p.m.:
- Anthropology Museum Young Hall
- Botanical Conservatory, greenhouses along Kleiber Hall Drive
- Center for Plant Diversity, Sciences Lab Building
- Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, Bee Biology Road
- Nematode Collection, Sciences Lab Building
All participating museums and collections have active education and outreach programs, Yang said, but the collections are not always accessible to the public. In the event of rain, alternative locations are planned for the outdoor sites. Maps, signs and guides will be available at all the collections, online, and on social media, including Facebook and Twitter, @BioDivDay.
For further information about the event, access the UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day website.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Thank the girls (the worker bees), the honey they produce, and visitors' yearnings to taste some of nature's delectable liquid gold.
First on tap is the "World of Honey--North America" event from 6:30 to 8:30 pm., Wednesday, Feb. 1 in the Sensory Theatre at the Mondavi Institute of Wine and Food Science, UC Davis campus. Amina Harris, director of the Honey and Pollination Center, says the varietal honeys featured will be:
- Avocado from Mexico
- Meadowfoam from Oregon
- American bamboo from New York and
- Orange blossom from California and Florida
Pollination ecologist Neal Williams, associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and a Chancellor's Fellow, will discuss native pollinators. His research ranges from basic bee and pollination biology to conservation biology and agricultural pollination. Among his many interests: the interactions of floral visitors and the flowers they pollinate, as well as their foraging activities.
To register for World of Honey, access this site on the UC Davis College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences.
And mark your calendar for another sweet event! Valentine's Day is nearing and that means it's time for the Honey and Pollination Center's annual fundraiser, "The Feast: A Celebration of Mead and Honey." The popular event is set from 6 to 9 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 11 at the Mondavi Center for Wine and Food Science. More information and registration will be posted here.
The Honey and Pollination Center, headquartered in the Mondavi Institute of Wine and Food Science and affiliated with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, seeks to increase "consumer, industry and stakeholder understanding of the importance of bees, pollination, honey and other products of the hive to people and the environment through research, education, and outreach," Harris said.
In addition, the center has calendared a number of other events for 2017, including
- April 18: World of Honey Tasting Series (International)
- May 5-6: California Honey Festival (Woodland, Calif.)
- May 7: UC Davis Bee Symposium
- June 19-22: Advanced Mead Making
Bon appétit!
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, figured it was too rainy and too cold to head over to West Sacramento to look for the first cabbage white butterfly of the year, so he walked around campus Thursday.
And he found it.
Shapiro nabbed the cabbage white butterfly, Pieris rapae, at 1:56 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 19 in the student gardens near the Solano Park Apartments.
He again won the annual Butterfly-for-a-Beer contest, which he launched in 1972 as part of his long-term studies of butterfly life cycles and climate.
The contest rules indicate that the first person who finds the first cabbage white butterfly of the year in the three-county area of Yolo, Solano and Sacramento receives a pitcher of beer or its equivalent.
Shapiro, who has been defeated only four times in the contest (and all by UC Davis graduate students) said this was the first find on the campus.
“Earlier today I was asked when P. rapae would come out, given the very wet January this year. I replied that when it stopped raining. we'd probably get into tule fog…and that would take us into February for any decent butterfly weather.”
Jan. 19 dawned with a “a cold, unstable air mass overhead,” Shapiro recalled, describing it as “an ideal convective day, with showers and thundershowers popping up.”
With the ground and the vegetation sopping wet, he figured this would not a “potential rapae day.”
“When I got out of class at noon it was bright and sunny, clear overhead but with cumulus building to the west over the Coast Range. It felt warm and I might have gone to West Sacramento, but decided by the time I got there it would have clouded over and perhaps even be raining. So I got lunch and then walked over to the student gardens near the Solano Park Apartments just to gather host plant for my rapae culture--yes, I'm mass-rearing the bugs for photoperiod studies, and have some 100 live ones in a refrigerator."
“It remained sunny and got quite warm—55 or 56, I'd say," Shapiro related. "The vegetation was indeed sopping wet. At 12:59 I saw—a rapae. It was sitting quietly, wings folded, on a cultivated Brassica. It had not opened its wings to body-bask, that is, warm the body by exposure to incoming solar radiation. If it had, it almost certainly would have flown and, being netless, I would have lost it. Instead it just sat there as I picked it off the plant. I always carry one glasseine envelope in my eyeglass case. Into the envelope it went. It's a winter-phenotype male and, I imagine, had just emerged this morning and not yet flown.”
“This is the second year in a row that the first rapae was found in a garden rather than one of the conventional ‘warm pockets,' Shapiro noted. “What does it all mean?”
Davis resident Cindy McReynolds, program manager of the Bruce Hammock lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, spotted some cabbage white butterfly chrysalids in her garden two weeks ago. "They were on the cabbage when I was removing the vegetation."
Colleague/collaborator Matthew Forister, McMinn professor of biology at the University of Nevada, Reno (his major professor was Shapiro), said that Shapiro's find was right on time. "You couldn't have hit closer to the trend line if you'd tried," he told him, sending him the illustration below. "This year in red," he pointed out, noting that "the slope has not changed from last year."
The cabbage white was not the only butterfly Shapiro found on Jan. 19. He also noticed a “fresh-looking female West Coast Lady, Vanessa annabella, nectaring at a crucifer in the same garden—first one of those this year too, but it's a hibernator.”
Shapiro launched the "Beer-for-a-Butterfly" contest in 1972 to draw attention to Pieris rapae and its first flight. “Since 1972, the first flight has varied from Jan. 1 to Feb. 22, averaging about Jan. 20.” The butterfly is emerging earlier and earlier as the regional climate has warmed, said Shapiro, who researches biological responses to climate change. "The cabbage white is now emerging a week or so earlier on average than it did 30 years ago here."
The professor, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Entomological Society and the California Academy of Sciences, said the cabbage white butterfly inhabits vacant lots, fields and gardens where its host plants, weedy mustards, grow.
Shapiro teaches his students well. The other winners were his own graduate students: Adam Porter defeated him in 1983; and Sherri Graves and Rick VanBuskirk each won in the late 1990s.
Shapiro, who is in the field more than 200 days of the year, monitoring butterflies of central California, knows where to find the cabbage whites. He has collected many of his winners in mustard patches near railroad tracks in West Sacramento, Yolo County. Over the last seven years, five of the winners came from West Sacramento; one in Davis, Yolo County; and one in Suisun, Solano County.
Coincidentally, Shapiro caught the 2013 and 2009 winners on President Obama's Inauguration Day. This year he missed President Trump's Inauguration Day by a day.
Shapiro maintains a research website on butterflies, where he records the population trends. He and artist Tim Manolis co-authored A Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Valley Regions, published in 2007 by the University of California Press.