This is a common Gulf Frit caterpillar on a passionflower vine. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

NIMBY--"Not in My Back Yard"--is a term used to target unwanted development projects in a neighborhood. Irate residents ban together and tell a governmental agency, such as a city council: "Not in My Back Yard!" For example, they don't want that chemical plant, prison, toxic waste dump, strip club or casino next to them. 

But if you have butterflies in your back yard, NIMBY doesn't apply.

We planted seven passionflower vines (Passiflora) to attract the tropical Gulf Fritillaries (Agraulis vanillae), the brightly colored orange-reddish buterflies belonging to the family Nymphalidae and subfamily Heliconiinae.

It's a joy to see them fluttering around the yard--the females laying eggs and the males cruising for a "date."  From the eggs to the caterpillars to the chrysalids to the adults--the Gulf Frit population keeps expanding.

Then, surprisingly, we spotted an unfamiliar-looking caterpillar among all the rest.

"What is this?" we asked noted butterfly expert Art Shapiro, professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis, who monitors the butterfly population in the Central Valley and maintains a butterfly site.

"It's the melanic phase of the Gulf Frit larva, well-known in the southeast United States and in South America, but I've never seen one in California," Shapiro said. "Presumably genetic, but the genetics have not been worked out. See if you can breed from it!"

Wow! 

Well, what to do? We popped the VIP (or rather VIC for "Very Important Caterpillar") in our butterfly habitat container, newly purchased from the Bohart Museum of Entomology. 

The container is now home to a dozen caterpillars, six chrysalids, and one VIC. 

But breeding the butterfly? First, the caterpillar would have to form a chrysalis. Then, if and when the butterfly emerges, we'll have to determine the gender, provide a mate, and see if anything happens.

We're waiting.

Patiently.

A gray hairstreak discovered during the tour. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

Sponsored by the UC Davis Arboretum, the free event drew a plethora of butterfly enthusiasts of all ages, plus several canines.

Well, the state insect is the California dogface butterfly! That one, however, isn't found in the Arboretum.

Daubert, a molecular scientist in the UC Davis Department of Plant Pathology, knows his butterflies. He also writes short stories, illustrated with his own photographs. He blogs at threadsintheweb.com.

At the butterfly talk and tour, Daubert discussed the flowers that sustain our native butterflies and the plants that support them. 

Daubert encouraged "shout outs" so others would know of the presence of butterflies. The group sighted cabbage white butterflies, alfalfa butterflies and a gray hairstreak.  (And a lady beetle, aka ladybug, and aphids.)

Daubert pointed out the milkweed (Monarch's host plant), pipevine (Pipevine Swallowtail's host plant) and scores of other plants that butterflies visit.

Someone found a caterpillar, which Daubert held up for all to see. He identified it as the moth of a caterpillar,  an Arctiid.

Specificallly, it may have been a fall webworm,  Hyphantria cunea, a moth in the family Arctiidae, according to Art Shapiro, UC Davis professor of evolultion and ecology.

Elaine Fingerett, academic coordinator, UC Davis Arboretum, said the Arboretum may sponsor another butterfly walk and tour with Steve Daubert in the spring.  Stay tuned!

Although the tour participants spotted no Monarchs that morning (it was a little overcast and cool), Steve Daubert did. Following the tour, he saw a "Monarch fly through the Mesozoic Redwood Grove, moving due southwest."

Who would have thought?

Who would have thought that ants are more closely related to bees than they are to most wasps?

In ground-breaking research to be published Oct. 21 in Current Biology, a team of UC Davis scientists and a colleague from the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, American Museum of Natural History, has found that ants and bees are more genetically related to each other than they are to social wasps such as yellow jackets and paper wasps.

"Despite great interest in the ecology and behavior of these insects, their evolutionary relationships have never been fully clarified," said senior author and noted ant specialist Phil Ward, professor of entomology at UC Davis. "In particular, it has been uncertain how ants—the world’s most successful social insects—are related to bees and wasps. We were able to resolve this question by employing next-generation sequencing technology and advances in bioinformatics. This phylogeny, or evolutionary tree, provides a new framework for understanding the evolution of nesting, feeding and social behavior in Hymenoptera."

The researchers used state-of-the-art genome sequencing and bioinformatics to produce this significant research.

The six-member team: Ward; molecular geneticist and assistant professor Joanna Chiu;  honey bee scientist and assistant professor Brian Johnson; doctoral student-researcher Marek Borowiec of the Ward lab; and postdoctoral researcher Joel Atallah of the Johnson lab, all with  the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology; and visiting scientist Ernest K. Lee of the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, American Museum of Natural History.

Ants, bees and stinging wasps all belong to the aculeate (stinging) Hymenoptera clade -- the group in which social behavior is most extensively developed.

Said Chiu: “With a phylogeny or evolutionary progression that we think is reliable and robust, we can now start to understand how various morphological and/or behavioral traits evolved in these groups of insects, and even examine the genetic basis of these phenotypic changes.”

Said Johnson, whose lab studies the genetics, behavior, evolution and health of honey bees: "Using transcriptomics we were able to resolve a long standing question regarding the evolutionary relationships between stinging wasps, ants, and bees. We found that ants and bees are more closely related than previously thought. This result should be important for future studies focused on eusocial evolution, as it suggests that morphology may not be a good indicator of evolutionary relatedness in these groups of organisms."

The abstract: "Eusocial behavior has arisen in few animal groups, most notably in the aculeate Hymenoptera, a clade comprising ants, bees, and stinging wasps. Phylogeny is crucial to understanding the evolution of the salient features of these insects, including eusociality. Yet the phylogenetic relationships among the major lineages of aculeate Hymenoptera remain contentious. We address this problem here by generating and analyzing genomic data for a representative series of taxa. We obtain a single well-resolved and strongly supported tree, robust to multiple methods of phylogenetic inference. Apoidea (spheciform wasps and bees) and ants are sister groups, a novel finding that contradicts earlier views that ants are closer to ectoparasitoid wasps. Vespid wasps (paper wasps, yellow jackets, and relatives) are sister to all other aculeates except chrysidoids. Thus, all eusocial species of Hymenoptera are contained within two major groups, characterized by transport of larval provisions and nest construction, likely prerequisites for the evolution of eusociality. These two lineages are interpolated among three other clades of wasps whose species are predominantly ectoparasitoids on concealed hosts, the inferred ancestral condition for aculeates. This phylogeny provides a new framework for exploring the evolution of nesting, feeding, and social behavior within the stinging Hymenoptera."

Lynn Kimsey

Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, is fielding scores of calls after the National Geographic News (NGN) posted an article today (Oct. 4) about “the world’s biggest hornet wreaking havoc in northwestern China.”

Quoting the Chinese news agency Zinhua,  NGN reporter Brian Handwerk wrote that 42 people have died and some 1600 have been injured “since the outbreak of the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) began in July…and attacks continue even as local authorities take action, including destroying hundreds of hives and improving medical treatment for victims.”

Handwerk quoted Kimsey as saying "The problem with this particular hornet is that it's big, sort of thumb-sized, and it packs a lot of venom. And its nests get fairly large, including maybe several hundred individuals. They are aggressive, they are predatory, and they have been known to kill and eat an entire colony of honeybees.”

"And its nests get fairly large, including maybe several hundred individuals. They are aggressive, they are predatory, and they have been known to kill and eat an entire colony of honeybees," Kimsey told NGN.

Kimsey, known by her colleagues far and wide as "The Wasp Woman," spent much of the day answering news media queries.

Reached at her Bohart Museum office this afternoon, she said this species is “pretty aggressive.” This species is about two inches long.

“The giant hornet uses its venom to capture prey and to defend the colony,” she said. “But actually, I think the honey bee venom is actually more powerful than this hornet’s venom. The hornet is larger, has more venom, and can sting as many times as it wants." (Only the females sting.)

Unlike a hornet, a worker honey bee dies after stinging.

 “This time of year, the hornet colonies are grumpy and agitated,” Kimsey said.

And yes, the Bohart Museum, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus, houses giant hornet specimens. After all, it maintains a worldwide collection of nearly 8 million insect specimens.

Read what NGN, CNN and Wikipedia have to say about the world's biggest hornet.

"The stinger of the Asian giant hornet," according to Wikipedia, "is about 6 mm (1/4 of an inch) in length, and injects an especially potent venom that contains, like many bee and wasp venoms, a cytolytic peptide (specifically, a mastoparan) that can damage tissue by stimulating phospholipase action, in addition to its own intrinsic phospholipase. Masato Ono, an entomologist at Tamagawa University near Tokyo, described the sensation as feeling "like a hot nail being driven into my leg."