- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Insects are in. They're not only everywhere in nature (well, almost everywhere!), they've climbed, crawled, jumped, buzzed, fluttered, flew or otherwise positioned themselves on fashions, including the UC Davis Entomology Graduate Student Association (EGSA) t-shirts.
The EGSA, comprised of UC Davis graduate students who study insect systems, is an organization that "works to connect students from across disciplines, inform students of and provide opportunities for academic success, and to serve as a bridge between the students and administration," according to EGSA president Brendon Boudinot, an ant specialist/doctoral student in the Phil Ward lab.
As a year-around fundraising project, they sell t-shirts, which can be viewed and ordered online at https://mkt.com/UCDavisEntGrad/. Jill Oberski, a graduate student in the Phil Ward lab, serves as the t-shirt sales coordinator. She can be reached at jtoberski@ucdavis.edu.
Oberski designed an award-winning onesie, “My Sister Loves Me." It's an adult ant, “loosely based on Ochetellus, a mostly-Australian genus.”
Boudinot's award-winning design is REPRESANT, with illustrations by colleague Eli Sarnat, an alumnus of the Ward lab.
One of the favorite bee t-shirts depicts a honey bee emerging from its iconic hexagonal cells. It's the 2014 winner by then doctoral student Danny Klittich, now a California central coast agronomist.
Another "fave" bee shirt--this one showing a bee barbecuing--is by doctoral student and nematologist Corwin Parker, who studies with Steve Nadler, professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. It was one of the 2018 winners. (See the three winners on this site.)
EGSA is heading for the Entomological Society of America annual meeting in November. In addition to their participation, the graduate students will be selling shirts at the meeting, appropriately themed "Sharing Insects Globally." It's set for Nov. 11-14 in Vancouver, B.C. The EGSA also sells its t-shirts at other events, including at Briggs Hall during the annual UC Davis Picnic Day.
Insects rock. But some climb, crawl, jump, flutter, buzz, fly or otherwise position themselves on EGSA t-shirts.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Add an innovative project involving insects.
Add three talented instructors: Diane Ullman, professor of entomology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and lecturers Gale Okumura and Morissa Rubin of the UC Davis Department of Design
Result: an art exhibition, “The World of Insects: Paper, Tile, Branding and Packaging.” to take place from 6 to 8 p.m., Wednesday, June 6 in the Environmental Horticulture courtyard, located near Walter A. Buehler Alumni and Visitors Center on Alumni Drive. The event is free and open to the public.
The students will display their branding and packaging of their product for edible insects, said Okumura. "The design students were to create a pattern from the assigned insect, as well as design a logo for their branding, which was then applied to their packaging and business system," she said. "The packaging had be appealing to the consumer and in some sense, change behavior of the audience to buy edible insects by having appealing graphics."
Rubin said the silkscreen prints "focus on illustrations of the insect and its key features (entomology students) or graphic patterns derived from significant markings or features of the insect. Additionally design students have developed an insect related product and its entire graphic identity."
Bottom line: Prepare to enter an amazing world you may not have seen before--the incredible world of insects, coupled with innovative marketing and designs.
And maybe, just maybe, you'll add crickets to your diet?
If you haven't already?
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
If you attended the 2017 Entomological Society of America (ESA) meeting, held recently in Denver, you probably recognized a familiar face and his research.
Myrmecologist (ant specialist) Brendon Boudinot, doctoral candidate in the Phil Ward lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, won a first-place President's Prize at the Denver meeting.
This is the third year he has won first-place honors in the President's Prize competition, an opportunity for graduate students to present their research.
Boudinot, who studies classification and evolution of morphology, delivered a 10-minute oral presentation in the Systematics, Evolution and Biodiversity Section on "The Protopodal Theory of Genitalic Evolution in the Hexapoda (Arthropoda: Mandibulata: Pancrustacea)."
Judges evaluate the oral presentations on scientific content (50 percent) and presentation (50 percent). For scientific content, judges score them on introduction and background with pertinent literature cited; objectives clearly stated and concise; materials and methods (study design) clear and concise; results and discussion clear, concise and accurate; and significance of results to field of study. Judges evaluation the presentation on organization, slides and delivery.
For his work, he received a one-year free membership in ESA, a $75 cash prize, and a certificate.
Boudinot's previous President's Prizes were for presentations on the male genitalia of ants, and for providing the first male-based identification material for the ant genera of the New World.
"I study ants because they are a unique evolutionary radiation of wingless, social wasps; through the study of their genetic and morphological diversity, we are better able to understand the ecological and biogeographic components of the process of speciation," Boudinot said today. "I came to study ants through several years of work I did as an undergraduate sorting and identifying ants from thousands of leaf litter samples collected in Central America by the Leaf Litter Arthropods of MesoAmerica project, which I was involved in (see photo of him in Honduras during 2010, as well as a little blurb from the year before he joined UC Davis graduate program)."
Boudinot traces his initial interest in the taxonomic and morphological diversity of ants through direct observational experience. Now, as a member of the Ward Lab, he continues his work, which encompasses three components:
- the diversity and classification of male ants in the New World
- a reclassification of the Formicidae based on phylogenetic analyses combining fossils with living taxa, and
- a study of the morphological evolution of the abdomen of insects, borne out of work done in projects (1) and (2).
Boudinot completed his undergraduate work at the Evergreen State College, Olympia, Wash., and spent a year working as a research technician at the University of Utah before starting his graduate work in 2014 with advisor Phil Ward. He focuses his research on evolution and ecology, approached from the perspective of systematics. “I integrate several lines of inquiry to answer historical evolutionary questions, including morphological and molecular phylogenetics, paleontology, and traditional comparative morphology,” Boudinot related. “I specialize on the skeletomusculature system of the male genitalia of the Hexapoda and the classification of the Formicoidea.”
Ants are highly diverse, with more than 13,000 known species, Boudinot says. "They are, however, but one stitch in the diversity of all insects, and we are entering a new era for the study of morphology in the 21st century."
The genitalia of male insects are fascinating, he said. "Both male and female insect genitalia are derived from the appendages of a pair of abdominal segments. Evidence from the skeletomusculature indicates that these structures are really legs of a crustacean ancestor that have been modified for numerous reproductive tasks--from copulation and insemination, to singing and silk-spinning."
When he's not studying ants, you can find Brendon Boudinot serving as president of the Entomology Graduate Student Association (EGSA), his second term at the helm. In this capacity, he functions as student liaison to the faculty, and as chair or co-chair of several committees, both for departmental and graduate student events (including the Entomology Seminar Series, Retreat Committee, annual Graduate Student Recruitment Day, Picnic Day, and various graduate student social events).
UC Davis doctoral candidate Sarah Silverman of the James R. Carey lab joined Boudinot in the winners' circle at the ESA meeting. She won a second place award in the President's Prize competition, delivering a 10-minute oral presentation in the Diptera-Mosquitoes category of the Medical, Urban, and Veterinary Entomology Section, on “Population as Cohort: Interpreting the Mortality Patterns of Wild-Caught Adult Mosquitoes of Unknown Ages.”
Her work at UC Davis is in the field of insect demography. “I specifically study insect lifespan in the wild," she said, "as well as the the age-structure of insect populations in the wild using an innovative methodological approach: the capture of live-insects in the wild which are then maintained and observed in the lab until death." Silverman completed her bachelor's degree in environmental science at McGill University in Montreal. For her undergraduate thesis, she studied the phenology of wild Osmia bees.
/span>- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Extra, extra, read all about it!
This "extra" has nothing to do with a special edition of a newspaper.
This "extra" deals with something that may puzzle you.
This "extra" refers to the passionflower vine (Passiflora), the host plant of the Gulf Fritillary butterfly (Agraulis vanillae).
About this time of year, the Gulf Frit caterpillars have probably skeletonized your passionflower vine. It's the Halloween poster child of the plant world.
But why, then, are honey bees foraging on a flowerless Passiflora? Their activity has nothing to do with pollination. They're foraging on the leaves and stems. And they're not seeking water.
Extension apiculturist (emeritus) Eric Mussen, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, answered that question with three little words: "Extra-floral nectary."
Extra-floral nectary.
It's a subject unfamiliar to many non-botanists and non-biologists.
Wikipedia describes it this way: "Nectar is a sugar-rich liquid produced by plants in glands called nectaries, either within the flowers with which it attracts pollinating animals, or by extrafloral nectaries, which provide a nutrient source to animal mutualists, which in turn provide antiherbivore protection."
Lenore Durkee of Grinnell (Iowa) College wrote a scientific paper, "The Floral and Extra-Floral Nectaries of Passiflora," published in the October 1982 edition of the American Journal of Botany, that answers the question and explains the phenomenon.
She defined extra-floral nectaries as "glands that secrete primarily sugars and are found on the vegetative portions of many species of plants."
In her research, Durkee studied the extra-floral nectaries of nine species of Passiflora with light and electron microscopy prior to and during secretion. In her abstract, meant for botanists, she wrote: "There is no evidence of ER or Golfi participation in the secretion of nectar. The vascular tissue supplying the nectary is characterized by companion and pholem parenchyma cells which are usually larger than the sieve elements, a configuration similar to that found in leaf minor veins. In the petiolar nectaries, large masses of membrane-bound protein are commonly found in these cells. This protein is absent in laminar nectaries."
That's probably TMI (too much information) unless you're a botanist.
No worries. The bonus is this: the next time someone asks you why honey bees are foraging on the leaves and stems of your Passiflora (don't you hear that all the time?), you can answer "Extra Flora Nectaries" or "EFN." You can explain that flowers produce nectar but extra-floral nectaries are just nectar-producing glands physically apart from the flower. And, you could add that EFN occurs in more than 2000 plant species in more than 64 families, according to scientists at University of Florida Extension.
Ants like EFN, too.
So do a lot of other insects, including those hungry Gulf Fritillary caterpillars that eat everything in sight...and out of sight...
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Friday noon!
At Friday noon, July 17, ant specialist Phil Ward, professor of entomology, will present a program on the species of ants found in the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven. This will be a special brown bag session in the haven, located on Bee Biology Road, next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility.
Among the native ants at the haven are
- Dorymyrmex insanus (workers small, ~3 mm long, black; conspicuous crater-shaped nests in bare soil)
- Dorymyrmex bicolor (workers small, ~3 mm long, bicolored, dull orange and black; conspicuous crater-shaped nests in bare soil)
- Prenolepis imparis (also known as the “winter ant” or “winter honey ant”; workers small (3-4 mm long), brown, with shiny gaster; inconspicuous nests in soil)
- Formica moki (sometimes called “field ants”; workers medium-sized (6 mm long), with a dark head, orange-brown mesosoma (thorax) and silvery-gray gaster; nest in soil)
Images of these species can be found on the AntWeb (www.antweb.org).
At least six other species of native ants reside in the vicinity of the garden, including Formica aerata, Pogonomyrmex subdentatus, and Solenopsis xyloni. The introduced Argentine ant (Linepithema humile) occurs around the Bee Biology building, but it appears not to have colonized the bee garden.
Attendees will learn how to observe and identify California native ants, and learn about the differences between bees and ants in this free event. For more information see the flier and access the haven web site. The haven is owned and operated by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. It was planted in the fall of 2009. Christine Casey is the staff director and Extension apiculturist Elina Niño is the faculty director.
Then on Saturday night, July 18, the Bohart Museum of Entomology's first-ever evening open house will take place from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. The Bohart is located at 1124 Academic Surge on Crocker Lane. Free and open to the public, Moth Night will include outdoor collecting; viewing of the Bohart Museum's vast collection of worldwide moth specimens; demonstrations on how to spread the wings of a moth; and information on how to differentiate a moth from a butterfly. Free hot chocolate will be served.
The event is in keeping with National Moth Week, July 18-26, an annual event coordinated by Friends of the East Brunswick (New Jersey) Environmental Commission. This year, National Moth Week will spotlight the Sphingidae family of moths found throughout the world commonly called hawk moths, sphinx moths and hornworms. Citizen scientists will be out in force to record and photograph what they see that week.
Tabatha Yang, public education and outreach coordinator of the Bohart, said that after the sun sets, a black light demonstration will be held. Visitors will collect moths from a white sheet, much as residents do around their porch lights.
Entomologist Jeff Smith of Rocklin, an associate and 27-year volunteer at the Bohart Museum, will show visitors how to spread the wings of moths. Smith curates the 400,000-specimen Lepidoptera collection at the Bohart Museum. Smith organizes and identifies the butterflies and moths, creates the drawers that display them, and the labels that identify them. In between, he shares his passion for insects and spiders at outreach programs. Since 1988, Smith has spread the wings of 200,000 butterflies and moths, or about 7000 a year.
Naturalist Greg Kareofelas of Davis, a longtime associate at the Bohart Museum, will assist with the open house and the outdoor collecting. The Bohart Museum, directed by Lynn Kimsey, professor of entomology at UC Davis, is a world-renowned insect museum that houses a global collection of nearly 8 million specimens.