Congratulations to UC Davis distinguished professor Bruce Hammock!

Hammock,  internationally recognized for discovering a new group of human chemical mediators, is a newly inducted Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences (CAS).  (He's also our favorite to some day win the Nobel Prize, as we've told him many times!)

Hammock, who holds a joint appointment with the Department of Entomology and Nematology and the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center,  was inducted along with 13 other Fellows on Nov. 14 during the annual Fellowship meeting. He joins the ranks of more than 500 Academy Fellows, a governing group of distinguished scientists and other leaders who have made notable contributions to scientific research, education, and communication.

“We're proud to announce 2023's distinguished pool of new Fellows—each of their contributions to science and society represent major advancements in their respective fields,” said Academy Dean of Science and Research Collections Shannon Bennett. “Our Fellows body is a group of future thinkers and innovators whose leadership inspires the next generation of scientists, science educators, story-tellers and change-makers. We look forward to forging a future with our new Fellows that advances the Academy's mission to regenerate the natural world through science, learning, and collaborative partnerships.”

A member of the UC Davis faculty since 1980, Hammock was nominated by colleagues James R. Carey, UC Davis distinguished professor,  and Robert E. Page Jr., UC Davis distinguished emeritus professor and emeritus provost of Arizona State University. The CAS Board of Trustees selects the Fellows.

Hammock discovered that regulating degradation of insect hormone mediators is as important as biosynthesis in development. He applied this toward the development of green chemical and the first recombinant viral pesticide. He asked if the same systems of metabolism of chemical mediators could be important in other species, notably man, resulting in the discovery of a new group of human chemical mediators. By inhibiting a key enzyme in this pathway, beneficial natural mediators increased there by showing benefit in treating multiple diseases including arthritis, cancer, Alzheimer's with the resulting drug candidates currently in human trials to treat pain.

Hammock co-discovered a human enzyme termed Soluble Epoxide Hydrolase (sEH), a key regulatory enzyme involved in the metabolism of fatty acids. It regulates a new class of natural chemical mediators, which in turn regulates inflammation, blood pressure and pain.  Hammock and his lab have been involved in enzyme research for more than 50 years. 

Hammock founded the Davis-based pharmaceutical company, EicOsis LLC, formed in 2011 to develop an orally active non-addictive drug for inflammatory and neuropathic pain. The former chief executive officer, he now serves on the board of directors.

Hammock directed the UC Davis Superfund Research Program (funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences) for nearly four  decades, supporting scores of pre- and postdoctoral scholars in interdisciplinary research in five different colleges and graduate groups on campus. 

He is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and the National Academy of Sciences., and the Entomological Society of America.  He is the recipient of scores of awards, including the first McGiff Memorial Awardee in Lipid Biochemistry; and the Bernard B. Brodie Award in Drug Metabolism, sponsored by the America Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. At UC Davis he received the Distinguished Teaching Award and the Faculty Research Lectureship. In 2020, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from UC Davis Chancellor Gary May.

Hammock has authored or co-authored more than 1,400 peer-reviewed publications and holds more than 95 patents in agriculture, environmental science and medicinal chemistry. 

Hammock is known for his expertise in chemistry, toxicology, biochemistry and entomology. Early in his career, he founded the field of environmental immunoassay, using antibodies and biosensors to monitor food and environmental safety, and human exposure to pesticides. His groundbreaking research in insect physiology, toxicology led to his development of the first recombinant virus for insect control. 

A native of Little Rock, Ark., Hammock received his bachelor's degree in entomology (with minors in zoology and chemistry) magna cum laude from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, in 1969. He received his doctorate in entomology-toxicology from UC Berkeley in 1973. Hammock served as a public health medical officer with the U.S. Army Academy of Health Science, San Antonio, and as a postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation, Department of Biology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. 

In the Army, he served as a medical officer at Fort Sam, Houston, and what he saw--severely burned people in terrible pain--made a lasting impression on him and steered him toward helping humankind.

Fun Fact: For years Hammock--who believes science should be fun and camaraderie is crucial-- hosted water balloon battles on the Briggs Hall lawn. It was not "Fifteen Minutes of Fame"; it was "Fifteen Minutes of Aim." See Bug Squad blog.

Check out UC Davis distinguished professor Walter Leal's video of the Fellows' induction.  (A screen shot is below)  Leal is on X (used to be Twitter) at @wsleal2014.

UC Davis distinguished professor emeritus Art Shapiro, who's been monitoring the butterfly populations of central California since 1972, discussed his work at the Bohart Museum of Entomology recent open house on monarchs.

He points out that he is a Lepidopterist but "not a monarch specialist."

Shapiro's 10 monitoring sites stretch from the Sacramento River Delta through the Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada mountains to the high desert of the Western Great Basin. The largest and oldest database in North America, it was recently cited by British conservation biologist Chris Thomas in a worldwide study of insect biomass.

Shapiro records his research on his website at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/.

At the Bohart Museum open house, his topics included the research that he co-authored, "Understanding a Migratory Species in a Changing World: Climatic Effects and Demographic Declines in the Western Monarch Revealed by Four Decades of Intensive Monitoring" (Anne Espeset et al), published in Oecologica in 2017. Professor Matthew Forister of the University of Nevada, one of his former graduate students, is among the co-authors.

The abstract: "Migratory animals pose unique challenges for conservation biologists, and we have much to learn about how migratory species respond to drivers of global change. Research has cast doubt on the stability of the eastern monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) population in North America, but the western monarchs have not been as intensively examined. Using a Bayesian hierarchical model, sightings of western monarchs over approximately 40 years were investigated using summer flight records from ten sites along an elevational transect in Northern California. Multiple weather variables were examined, including local and regional temperature and precipitation. Population trends from the ten focal sites and a subset of western overwintering sites were compared to summer and overwintering data from the eastern migration. Records showed western overwintering grounds and western breeding grounds had negative trends over time, with declines concentrated early in the breeding season, which were potentially more severe than in the eastern population. Temporal variation in the western monarch also appears to be largely independent of (uncorrelated with) the dynamics in the east. For our focal sites, warmer temperatures had positive effects during winter and spring, and precipitation had a positive effect during spring. These climatic associations add to our understanding of biotic-abiotic interactions in a migratory butterfly, but shifting climatic conditions do not explain the overall, long-term, negative population trajectory observed in our data."

Shapiro also provided several handouts: his general comments about monarchs; his monarch sightings in North and West Sacramento since 1999; his monarch sightings in Rancho Cordova and Suisun since 1999; and a Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation graph showing the number of overwintering Western monarchs along the California coast from 1997 to 2022. (See 2022 Xerces website graph showing the 2021-22 Thanksgiving and New Year's counts. The Western monarchs rebounded then to a final tally of nearly 250,000 butterflies, Xerces noted on its website, but that was "still 95 percent below historical population.")

Handout. "When I was asked to participate in this event, it got me thinking…" Shapiro began in his monarch comments handout.

"My group did an analysis of the Monarch vis-à-vis climate in a 2017 paper (Espeset et al.,, DOI: 10.1007/s00442-01607600-1) None of my group is a Monarch specialist, and that includes me. Since 1999 I have done counts of all butterfly species at 4 Valley sites (Suisun, West Sacramento, North Sacramento and Rancho Cordova) using standard “Pollard walk” methods, slightly modified. As a result we have a quantitative picture of Monarchs in breeding season...  Such data are very rare. Population estimates of Monarchs are typically based on the overwintering (non-breeding) aggregations and we know from published material that what breeding-season data exist routinely diverge from the overwintering data. That is, trends in population size as measured by overwinter animals are not routinely reflected in the summer numbers. There can be a variety of explanations for this. To me the most likely is that as a very mobile species, the Monarch may breed in different places in different years, so that a monitoring program like mine, based on a limited number of fixed, Intensively-monitored sites, is unlikely to capture this stochasticity in where Monarchs breed. I am attaching the overwintering estimates from the Xerces Society. Direct quantitative comparisons are inappropriate, but you can judge how well the local trends match them just by eyeball (until  we develop a convincing statistical approach to the problem!)

"Except for Suisun in fall migration season in the 'old days' (and Monarchs used to overwinter there! But haven't for decades), our numbers are very small and always have been, reflecting a very real disparity in abundance between California and the East and especially the Midwest in breeding season. And our numbers have fluctuated in the short term for reasons that are just not understood—apart from longer-term trends—but they might be related to climate, as per Espeset et al.

"My assignment for today forced me back to the original data for my Valley sites. The actual data are reproduced on the attached sheets. It is immediately evident that: 

1. There is very high variability in Monarch numbers among years at all sites, but 
2. There are short-term trends that may be associated with climatic fluctuations, in particular drought, and
3. Among my sites, Suisun has had the highest counts, partly but not entirely reflecting coastward migration from farther inland early in the season, but these high numbers have effectively disappeared—perhaps reflecting a systematic change in migratory trajectories, and
4. Rancho Cordova has very consistently had the lowest counts, with little year-to-year variation compared to other sites..

"My interest is now piqued and I am going to go with this. From 1972 to 1998 at all sites, and from 1972 to date at our 5 mountain sites, monitoring was on a presence/absence basis only because there are too many species to Pollard-count simultaneously. But the seasonal distribution of the Monarch is still easily extracted. We know Monarch breeding seasonality has changed over the 50-year time span of this study. We also have devised and published methods to use presence-absence data (“day-positives”) as a crude proxy for population trends. This is perhaps a good moment to revisit the Espeset et al. paper and try to get into the specific components of Monarch trends. Suggestions are welcome!" (amshapiro@ucdavis.edu)

Shapiro, who joined the UC Davis faculty in 1971, continues his research.  The author of the book, Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento Valley Regions, he has studied more than 160 species of butterflies in his transect. 

It was a monarch state of mind...

Western monarchs are now settling in their overwintering sites along coastal California, but the iconic butterflies showed up in force at the Bohart Museum of Entomology's recent open house--in the form of specimens, photographs, books, maps and displays.

Some 650 visitors arrived to talk to the scientists, see the displays, and take home native milkweed seed packets, provided by community ecologist Louie Yang, professor of entomology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology (ENT-NEM). Yang shared seeds of narrow-leafed milkweed, Asclepias fascicularis.

Statistics show that the overwintering population of western monarchs along coastal California has declined by more than 99 percent since the 1980s, according to the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, but the population has been showing a mini-boom in recent years. Scientists blame habitat destruction, pesticide use, and climate change as the primary causes of the decline.

Scientists participating in the open house were:

• UC Davis distinguished professor emeritus Art Shapiro of the Department of Evolution and Ecology, who has studied butterfly populations in central California since 1972 and maintains a research website, Art's Butterfly World.
  
  
• UC Davis emeritus professor Hugh Dingle, a worldwide authority on animal migration, including monarchs.  He is the author of Migration: The Biology of Life on the Move (Oxford University Press), a sequel to the first edition published in 1996. (See news story on the ENT-NEM website.)
  
  
• UC Davis professor Louie Yang, who does research on monarchs and milkweed and has been featured nationally. (See news story about his work.)
  
  
• UC Davis professor Elizabeth Crone of the Department of Evolution and Ecology, formerly of Tufts University, who researches monarchs. (See news story about the declining monarch population on the ENT-NEM website.)

In addition, the Bohart Museum showcased monarch photography by Larry Snyder of Davis and Kathy Keatley Garvey of ENT-NEM. 

Yang and Crone were among the 12 nationally invited scientists who delivered presentations during the two-day Monarch Butterfly Summit, held last year at the Capitol in Washington D.C. and organized by Sen. Jeffrey Merkley of Oregon, During that summit, the Department of the Interior announced a $1 million award to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation's Monarch Butterfly and Pollinators Conservation Fund, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a Pollinator Conservation Center. (See news story)

In another project, Yang organized and led a three-year study of wild monarch butterflies and milkweed in rural Davis. The project, funded by two of Yang's National Science Foundation grants, involved UC Davis, Davis Senior High School and the Center for Land-based Learning, Woodland. The 135-member team included 107 high school students, a K-12 teacher, 18 UC Davis undergraduates, three graduate students and two postgraduate researchers. 

"This study collected a high-resolution temporal dataset on milkweed-monarch interactions during the three years prior to the precipitous single-year population decline of western monarchs in 2018,” Yang said. From 2015 through 2017, the  team monitored the interactions of monarchs, Danaus plexippus, on narrow-leafed milkweed, A. fascicularis, planted in December 2013 on city-owned property. 

The Yang team published the results, “Different Factors Limit Early- and Late-Season Windows of Opportunity for Monarch Development,” in the journal  Ecology and Evolution. 

“This study has three key findings,” Yang related. “First, we documented early and late seasonal windows of opportunity in the wild, migratory western monarch population. Second, our data suggest that early and late seasonal windows were constrained by different factors. Third, climatic and microclimatic variation had a strong effect on the timing and importance of multiple factors affecting monarch development. Broadly, we hope that this study contributes to a more temporally detailed understanding of the complex factors that contribute to year-to-year variation in monarch breeding success.”  (See news story on ENT-NEM website)

In February of 2022, Yang appeared on Science Friday, National Public Radio, in an interview titled "How Long Will California's Butterfly Boom Last?"

Hugh Dingle. Professor Dingle, an internationally known expert on animal migration, has researched animal migration for some 50 years. In the last two decades, he has focused on monarch butterflies.  National Geographic featured him in its cover story on “Great Migrations” in November 2010.  LiveScience interviewed him for its November 2010 piece on “Why Do Animals Migrate?” 

Dingle, a resident of Marin County, responded to a recent front-page article in a Marin County paper about the California ban on tropical milkweed. Banning tropical milkweed, A. curassavica will NOT save the monarch, Dingle emailed the reporter. In fact, he said, the ban will "essentially have zero effect on monarchs" and "no one should rush out and pull out their tropical milkweed as it would be a waste of time and effort. Nurseries should also be able to continue to sell it." The plant has been in California for more than 100 years.

Dingle says:

1. "There is not enough tropical milkweed planted to have much influence (see the amount of A. syriaca and A. fascicularis throughout the American West not to mention various other species like A. erosa, cordifolia, californica, etc.) Yes, there are parasites on A. curassavica as there are on ALL milkweeds."
   
   
2. "There are populations of monarchs that are doing just fine feeding exclusively on A. curassavica (e.g. on many Pacific Islands, such as Guam where I have studied them."
   
   
3. "Migration and the diapause that accompanies it in the fall are determined by shortening photoperiod and temperature (warm temps can override short days hence the issue with climate change). There is no significant influence of food plant." 

Elizabeth Crone. Crone focuses her research on population ecology, "especially of plants and insects, and plant-animal interactions. Specifically, I am interested in how environmental changes translate to changes in population dynamics in animals. I was also one of the first ecologists to use generalized linear mixed models to parameterize stochastic population models." She co-authored "Why Are Monarch Butterflies Declining in the West? Understanding the Importance of Multiple Correlated Drivers," published in 2019 in Ecological Applications, Ecological Society of America.

The abstract includes: "Our results suggest a two-pronged approach to monarch conservation, specifically, starting efforts now to restore habitat, while also using experiments to more clearly delineate separate effects of climate and land use factor."

Art Shapiro. Professor Shapiro shared several handouts, including "Comments on Monarchs." He co-authored research (lead author Anne Espeset and six other colleagues) titled, "Understanding a Migratory Species in a Changing World: Climatic Effects and Demographic Declines in the Western Monarch Revealed by Four Decades of Intensive Monitoring," published in Population Ecology.

"None of my group is a Monarch specialist, and that includes me," Shapiro wrote in the handout. "Since 1999 I have done counts of all butterfly species at 4 Valley sites (Suisun, West Sacramento, North Sacramento and Rancho Cordova) using standard 'Pollard walk' methods, slightly modified. As a result we have a quantitative picture of Monarchs in breeding season over 14 years. Such data are very rare. Population estimates of Monarchs are typically based on the overwintering (non-breeding) aggregations and we know from published material that what breeding-season data exist routinely diverge from the overwintering data. That is, trends in population size as measured by overwinter animals are not routinely reflected in the summer numbers. There can be a variety of explanations for this. To me the most likely is that as a very mobile species, the Monarch may breed in different places in different years, so that a monitoring program like mine, based on a limited number of fixed, Intensively-monitored sites, is unlikely to capture this stochasticity in where Monarchs breed."

Over the last 50 years,  "Suisun has had the highest counts (of monarchs), partly but not entirely reflecting coastward migration from farther inland early in the season, but these high numbers have effectively disappeared—perhaps reflecting a systematic change in migratory trajectories."

Also at the open house, entomologist Jeff Smith, who curates the Bohart's Lepidoptera collection, and colleague  Greg Kareofelas showed visitors drawers of monarch and other butterfly specimens.

Two origami monarchs, the work of UC Davis alumnus Kevin Murakoshi of Davis and a gift to the Bohart Museum, drew special attention. Murakoshi earlier crafted origami praying mantises, ticks and bed bugs for Bohart Museum open houses.

One of the books displayed at the open house was UC Berkeley professor Noah Whiteman's newly published work, "Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature's Toxins--from Spices to Vices" (Little Brown Spark, Oct. 24, 2023) It includes information on the toxicity of milkweed.

The Bohart Museum, directed by UC Davis distinguished professor Lynn Kimsey, is located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus. It is the home of a global collection of eight million insect specimens. It also houses a live "petting zoo" (including Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects and tarantulas) and a gift shop.

Congratulations to UC Davis doctoral students Shawn Christensen, Lexie Martin and Iris Quayle!

They each won the President's Prize (first-place) for their graduate student research presentations this week at the Entomological Society of America (ESA) meeting in National Harbor, Md.

That's quite a feat and well-deserved! From bees to beetles...

Shawn and Lexie are members of the lab of associate professor and community ecologist Rachel Vannette, who serves as vice chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology andNematology. Iris studies with professor and arachnologist  Jason Bond, the Evert and Marion Schlinger Endowed Chair in Insect Systematics for the department, and associate dean, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

Shawn competed in the Plant-Insect Ecosystems (P-IE) Section, Apiculture; Lexie in the P-IE Section, Pollinator Biology; and Iris in Systematics, Evolution, and Biodiversity (SysEB) Section, Biogeography.

Shawn, who has advanced from doctoral student to doctoral candidate, presented his research, titled "Bee Specific! Solitary Bee (Anthophora bomboides) Hosts a Specialized Core Microbiome through Development." Lexie delivered her presentation on "Establishment and Health Impacts of Floral and Intraspecific Microbes in Bees." And Iris? “Colorless but Never Dull: Unraveling Population Genetics and Color Evolution in ‘White' Darkling Beetles (Onymacris).” (See news story)

Iris earlier won first-place for her graduate student presentation at the annual meeting of the Pacific Branch of ESA (PBESA), held in April in Seattle. This was her first-ever presentation at a scientific meeting.  “Iris has hit the ground running in all respects," Professor Bond commented at the time. "Winning the student paper award, the first time ever presenting her research, reflects her exceptional capabilities as a scientist and as a future professor and teacher. Iris comes from a non-traditional STEM background and it is exactly those experiences that will continue to contribute to her success as she evolves as a scientist. I predict that this is only a prelude of things to come.”

Iris is focusing her dissertation on the evolutionary relationships and color/trait evolution in Onymacris. Tenebrionidae (darkling beetles) comprise “more than 80 percent of all known beetle species in the Namib desert (Southern Africa) where the genus Onymacris contains a rarity unexpected from aptly named darkling beetles--the presence of several species with striking ‘white' elytra (wing sheaths).” (See news story)

The complete list of student winners--first, second and third places--is posted on the ESA site.

Founded in 1889, ESA is the largest entomological organization in the world. Its more than 7,000 members are affiliated with educational institutions, health agencies, private industry, and government.