- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The soldiers called the mosquitoes "gallinippers."
Physicians had not yet linked malaria to Anopheles mosquitoes. They believed "humidity" or “swamp effluvia" caused what they called "intermittent fever."
Soldiers who contracted "intermittent fever" complained of "ague" (fever and chills) or "the shakes."
Sam, a towering farm boy from Linn., Mo., was 18 when he enlisted in the Union Army. Company commanders selected him as the color bearer for three reasons: his height (6' 3"), his strength (hoisting the flag and flying it high) and his courage (front lines)
"Being a color bearer (aka carrying the flag), was a prestigious and important role in the Army. Not only were you carrying the symbol of what you were fighting for, the flag was any easy mark for soldiers to organize around," according to an article written in a National Museum of Civil War Medicine post by Amelia Grabowski, the outreach and education coordinator at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine and the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum.
"When one color-bearer fell, another immediately took his place. For instance, Colonel D. K. Mcrae of the 5th North Carolina Infantry, Commanding Brigade recorded this about the Battle of Williamsburg: My color bearer was first struck down, when his comrade seized the flag, who fell immediately. A third took it and shared the same fate; then Capt. Benjamin Robinson, of Company A, carried it until the staff had shivered to pieces in his hands."
"...The flags made them (color bearers) easy and enticing targets," Grabowski wrote.
Young Samuel carried the flag in three of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War: the Battle of Lookout Mountain, and the battles of Chicamauga and Chattanooga. A musket tore a hole in his flag but he emerged from the Civil War physically unscathed.
"The diagnosis of malaria at the time of the Civil War was made by symptoms and not the laboratory tests we use today," wrote Lloyd Klein and Eric Wittenberg of San Francisco, in Hektoen International, a Journal of Medical Humanities. "Nineteenth-century physicians diagnosed malaria as a recurrent, intermittent, or 'periodic' fever and categorized it according to how often fever spikes or 'paroxysms' occurred. A 'quotidian' fever occurs once every twenty-four hours, a 'tertian' every forty-eight, and a 'quartan' every seventy-two."
The authors related that malaria killed some 30,000 Civil War soldiers. Among Union soldiers, some 10,000 died of malaria, and records show more than a million cases of the disease.
Ironically, after surviving the Civil War, Samuel Davidson Laughlin died from blood poisoning when a splinter lodged in his hand when he was carrying an armload of firewood into the family home in Castle Rock, Wash. The color bearer, the husband, the father, and the grandfather died Feb. 24, 1910 in an Oregon hospital. He is buried on a knoll overlooking the historic round barn (now in the National Register of Historic Places) that he built in 1883.
His gravestone reads simply: "Gone, but not forgotten."
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
In the blink of an eye...
There it was, nestled inside a baby blue eyes blossom, Nemophila menziesii, which is a spring-blooming plant native to California, Oregon and Baja California.
"It?" A katydid nymph, a wingless critter with long black-and-white banded antennae.
The UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program (UC IPM) tells us that "nymphs appear in April and May and take 2 to 3 months to mature through 6 to 8 instars."
"At least 74 species of katydids (family Tettigoniidae) are present in California," according to UC IPM. "Most are not pests because they chew only a small amount of foliage before moving to another plant. Forktailed bush katydid (Scudderia furcata) can be a pest because it chews young fruit in addition to leaves. Angularwinged katydid (Microcentrum retinerve) and broadwinged katydid (Microcentrum rhombifolium) are other common species.--UC IPM post on katydids.
This nymph crawled around the blossom, stretched to reach the next one, and then, up and over it went.
Just a day in the life of katydid nymph on baby blue eyes.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Back in April of 2021, we wrote: "They're out there, and you don't have to crane your neck to see them."
The topic: crane flies. They're often mistakenly called "mosquito eaters" or "mosquito hawks." They're neither. They're members of the family Tipulidae of the order Diptera (flies).
Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and UC Davis distinguished professor of entomology, emphasizes that crane flies don't eat mosquitoes. "In fact, adult crane flies generally don't eat at all," she points out. "Their entire brief adult lives are spent searching for mates and laying eggs." Crane flies are attracted to lights at night and you may find them around your porch light.
"Adult crane flies emerge from the soil beneath turfgrass, pastures and other grassy areas in late summer and fall," according to the UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program, part of the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources. (We've sighted them only in the spring.) "The adults have very long legs and resemble large mosquitoes. Females mate and lay eggs in grass within 24 hours of emerging. Eggs hatch into small, brown, wormlike larvae that have very tough skin and are commonly referred to as leatherjackets.The leatherjackets feed on the roots and crowns of clover and grass plants during the fall. They spend the winter as larvae in the soil; when the weather warms in spring, they resume feeding. During the day larvae mostly stay underground, but on damp, warm nights they come to the surface to feed on the aboveground parts of many plants. When mature, the larvae are about about 1 to 1½ inch long. Around mid-May they enter a nonfeeding pupal stage and remain just below the soil surface. In late summer, pupae wriggle to the surface and the adults emerge. There is one generation a year."
It's not easy to photograph these slender, gangly, goofy-looking insects that resemble cartoon characters. If you spot them, they take flight. If you shadow them, they vanish. If you creep up upon them, they creep faster. If you say "Oh, well, Mr. Crane Fly, I didn't want to take your picture today anyway!"--that's when they pose.
I captured this image of a crane fly taking a break in a Spanish lavender bed on May 23, 2023. The morning light was just right.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It was a little late.
The first flameskimmer of the year usually arrives in our yard in early April.
Not this year. The species, Libellula saturata, was late.
The easily recognized red dragonfly, also known as "the firecracker skimmer," touched down in our yard today, May 24.
She perched on a bamboo stick in our pollinator garden, close to a fish pond, and eyed her surroundings.
It's amazing to watch them grab a flying insect and return to the perch to devour it.
Dragonflies belong to the order Odonata, which means "toothed one" in Greek.
Danish zoologist Johan Christian Fabricius, a student of Carl Linnaeus, coined the term Odonata in 1793. He is considered one of the greatest entomologists of the 18th century, according to Wikipedia. He named nearly 10,000 species of animals.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
That's true for assistant professor Katie Thompson-Peer of the Department of Developmental and Cell Biology, UC Irvine, who will speak on "Cellular Mechanisms of Dendrite Regeneration after Neuron Injury” at the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology seminar on Wednesday, May 24.
She uses the larvae and adult fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as a model to study dendrite regeneration.
Thompson-Peer will present her seminar at 4:10 p.m. in Room 122, Briggs Hall. Her seminar also will be virtual. The Zoom link: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672
Her abstract: “Neurons have two types of cellular projections, that are essential for how they function in circuits: they have a single axon and a highly branched network of dendrites. These dendrites are the cellular structures that allow neurons to receive input from the environment or from other neurons. While much is known about how axons respond to injury, almost nothing is known about how neurons respond to dendrite injury. We have found that after dendrite injury, peripheral nervous system neurons are able to mount a reliable, reproducible process of dendrite regeneration. In this talk, I present our recent work to determine how neurons detect injury to their dendrites, using the larvae and adult fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model to study dendrite regeneration.”
Thompson-Peer, who joined UC Irvine in April 2019, received her bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Pennsylvania, and then followed with a two-year stint at the Johns Hopkins University with Alex Kolodkin. She earned her doctorate from Harvard University, working with Josh Kaplan, and was a postdoctoral fellow with Yuh-Nung and Lily Jan at UC San Francisco and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her postdoctoral work drew financial support from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke F32 and K99/R00 fellowships, as well as a UC Office of the President's Postdoctoral Fellowship.
The Thompson-Peer lab explores how neurons recover from injury in vivo, and how this process is similar to and different from normal development. (See her work showcased on YouTube)
"At the most fundamental level, a neuron receives information along dendrites, and sends information down an axon to synaptic contacts," she writes on her website. "Dendrites can be injured by traumatic brain injury, stroke, and many forms of neurodegeneration, yet while the factors that control axon regeneration after injury have been extensively studied, we know almost nothing about dendrite regeneration. Our long-term research goal is to understand the cellular mechanisms of dendrite regeneration after injury."
"Our previous work found that the sensory neurons in the fruit fly Drosophila peripheral nervous system exhibit robust regeneration of dendrites after injury and used this system to explore central features of dendrite regeneration in developing animals, young adults, and aging adults. We have observed that after injury, neurons regrow dendrites that recreate some features of uninjured dendrites, but are unable to reconstruct an entire arbor that perfectly mimics an uninjured neuron. Moreover, there are mechanistic differences between the outgrowth of uninjured neurons versus the regeneration of dendrites after injury: dendrite regeneration is uniquely dependent on neuronal activity, ignores cues that constrain and pattern normal dendrite outgrowth, and confronts a mature tissue environment that is different from what a developing neuron would encounter. These challenges are significantly exacerbated when neurons in aging animals attempt to recover from injury."
Department seminar coordinator is urban landscape entomologist Emily Meineke, assistant professor. For technical issues regarding Zoom connections, she may be reached at ekmeineke@ucdavis.edu. (See complete list of spring seminars.)