- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
(Editor's note: This event has been postponed until the fall of 2013. Details pending.)
Mark your calenders!
The Honey and Pollination Center at the University of California, Davis, is planning a "Luncheon in the Garden" on Sunday, June 2 from noon to 3 p.m. in the Good Life Garden at the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science on campus.
It promises to be a delightful afternoon.
Executive director Amina Harris says it will be a "dazzling five-course meal from appetizers to cheese and desserts. Each course features honeys from around the globe."
The luncheon, open to the public, supports and introduces the Honey and Pollination Center. Food and drink will be provided by chefs, apiaries, wineries and meaderies (think wine made from honey), and the farmers of California.
What is the Honey and Pollination Center? Its vision is to establish UC Davis as a global center of excellence and education on bees, honey and pollination.
Its mission:
- Promote the use of high quality honey in the California market, help ensure the sustainability of honey production in California, and showcase the importance of honey and pollination to the well-being of Californians.
- Spearhead efforts to gain support and assemble teams for research, education and outreach programs for various stakeholder groups including: (1) the beekeeping industry, (2) agricultural interests who depend on bee pollination, (3) backyard beekeepers, and (4) the food industry
Its specific goals are five-fold:
- To optimize university resources by coordinating a multidisciplinary team of experts in honeyproduction, pollination and bee health
- To expand research and education efforts addressing the production, nutritional value, health benefits, economics, quality standards and appreciation of honey
- To serve the various agricultural stakeholders that depend on pollination services
- To help the industry develop informative and descriptive labeling guidelines for honey and bee-related products to establish transparency in the marketplace
- To elevate the perceived value of varietal honey to producers and consumers through education, marketing, and truth-in-labeling with the end goal of increasing the consumption of honey
Tickets are $125 per person. Like to attend? Contact events manager Tracy Diesslin at (530) 752-5233 or at tdiesslin@ucdavis.edu.
And if you'd like to make a donation, contact Harris at (530) 754-9301 or aharris@ucdavis.edu.
Meanwhile, be sure to check out the newly created Facebook page.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Claudio Gratton, associate professor in the Department of Entomology, University of Wisconsin, will speak on “Sustainable Bioenergy Landscapes: Can We Balance Our Need for Production and Biodiversity?” at a UC Davis Department of Entomology seminar on Wednesday, April 10.
His seminar will take place from 12:05 to 1 p.m. in Room 1022 of the Life Sciences Addition, corner of Hutchison and Kleiber Hall drives. Katharina Ullmann of the Neal Williams lab is the host. The seminar is scheduled to be recorded for later viewing on UCTV.
“Increasing demands for food, and now fuel, have put pressure on our agricultural lands,” Gratton says. “Land use and land cover are continuing to change the way we manage our lands with significant biological and ecosystem-level consequences.”
“The ‘simplification’ of the agricultural landscape, that is the removal of natural and semi-natural areas in the landscape and the increase in monocultures of annual crops, is typically associated with a decrease in species richness and increases in crop pest abundance,” he said. “These effects go beyond mere aesthetics. The consequences of landscape simplification are felt by growers who apply more pesticides in landscapes dominated by annual cropland. The question then, is can we balance our needs for agricultural production (both food and fuel) in a way that supports other ecosystem services on which we as humans depend?”
“I argue that understanding the relationships between landscape structure and the tradeoffs between ecosystem services will be a key a designing ‘custom’ multifunctional landscapes.”
Gratton, who has a bachelor of science degree in biology from the University of Illinois (1991) and a doctorate in entomology from UC Berkeley (1997), joined the University of Wisconsin faculty in 2003. His research group works broadly in the field of landscape ecology in both agricultural and natural systems. In Wisconsin agriculture, he has been interested in understanding how beneficial insects, such as pollinators and lady beetles, utilize the landscape and carry out important functions such as pollination of crops and suppression of insect pests.
His work in agroecology has included studying insect landscape ecology and conservation in potatoes, rotational grazing, grasslands, soybeans, cranberries and apples.
Gratton has worked with growers to understand how to best manage non-crop “natural” areas in the landscape in order to enhance and conserve beneficial insects. He is also an active member of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center as part of the team looking at developing sustainable bioenergy crops. He teaches courses in insect biological control, multivariate analysis and coastal field ecology.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The mosquito-borne viral disease known as “breakbone fever,” is three times more prevalent than originally thought, according to a research paper published today in Nature and co-authored by dengue expert Thomas Scott of UC Davis.
In their research paper, titled “The Global Distribution and Burden of Dengue,” Scott and the 17 other team members estimated that 350 million people are infected each year--more than triple the World Health Organization’s current estimate of 50 to 100 million.
Professor Simon Hay of the University of Oxford led the research as part of the International Research Consortium on Dengue Risk Assessment, Management and Surveillance.
“Dengue takes an enormous toll on human health worldwide, with as many as 4 billion people at risk," said Scott, a UC Davis professor of entomology and worldwide expert on the epidemiology and prevention of dengue. He chairs the mosquito-borne disease modelling group in the Research and Policy for Infectious Disease Dynamics (RAPIDD) program of the Science and Technology Directory, Department of Homeland Security, Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health.
“The results of our study and infrastructure that created the dengue maps fill a critical gap in the battle against dengue,” said Scott, who maintains field research programs in Iquitos, Peru, and Khamphaeng Phet, Thailand. “Prior to this, without rigorously derived dengue estimates that can be continuously updated, it was not possible to know with confidence where and when to direct interventions for greatest potential impact or to objectively assess the effectiveness of regional and global control efforts. That kind of knowledge was among the most important missing information for developing enhanced dengue prevention programs.”
The highly infectious tropical and subtropical disease is spread by the bite of an infected female Aedes aegypti, a day-biting, limited flight-range mosquito that prefers human blood to develop its eggs. Dengue is caused by four distinct, but closely related, viruses. The most severe form of disease is life-threatening dengue hemorrhagic fever or DHF.
The researchers assembled known records of dengue occurrence worldwide and used a formal modelling framework to map the global distribution of dengue risk. They then paired the resulting risk map with detailed longitudinal information from dengue cohort studies and population surfaces to infer the public health burden of dengue in 2010.
“There are currently no licensed vaccines or specific therapeutics, and substantial vector control efforts have not stopped its rapid emergence and global spread,” the researchers wrote.
Dengue has now begun to appear along the southern border of the United States, including Texas. Florida has also reported cases of dengue.
Of the 96 million clinically apparent dengue infections, Asia bears 70 percent of the burden, the research paper revealed. India alone accounts for around one-third of all infections.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
No wonder. The insect, measuring about 1.5 millimeters long, is much smaller than a grain of rice.
Now, however, they can see a teddy-bear-sized version, thanks to a University of California, Davis entomology major Kristina Tatiossian, a member of the Research Scholars Program in Insect Biology.
Through the UC Davis Art/Science Fusion Program, Tatiossian, a junior, crafted a ceramic mosaic sculpture of the tiny walnut twig beetle for her research poster, “Flight Response of the Walnut Twig Beetle, Pityophthorus juglandis, to Aggregation Pheromones Produced by Low Densities of Males.”
The beetle jutting from the poster is so true to form that scientists studying the insect not only readily recognize it, but point out that it’s a female. That includes her mentor, chemical ecologist and forest entomologist Steve Seybold of the Davis-based Pacific Southwest Research Station, USDA Forest Service, and an affiliate of the UC Davis Department of Entomology.
Seybold and Andrew Graves, a former UC Davis researcher with the UC Davis Department of Plant Pathology, who now works for the USDA Forest Service, first detected the newly recognized beetle-fungus disease, known as Thousand Cankers Disease (TCD), in California in 2008. TCD had been detected earlier in Colorado and its impact had been noted even earlier in New Mexico, Oregon, and Utah. TCD and its history are chronicled in a newly revised “Pest Alert” issued by the USDA Forest Service.
Tatiossian accomplished the research project as part of the Research Scholars Program in Insect Biology, which aims to provide undergraduates with a closely mentored research experience in biology. Headed by professor Jay Rosenheim, and assistant professor Louie Yang of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, the program currently has 12 students; students apply when they are freshmen, sophomores or transfer students. Tatiossian joined the program in 2011 and is mentored by Steve Seybold.
Tatiossian completed the ceramic mosaic project over a four-week period. She earlier worked on two UC Davis Art/Science Fusion Program projects, including the “Tree of Life,” with the program’s founders, entomologist/artist Diane Ullman and artist Donna Billick. A former Los Angeles resident, Tatiossian will receive her bachelor’s degree in entomology this June and then plans to attend graduate school to study either biochemistry or virology.
Tatiossian will giving an oral presentation on her research at the Pacific Branch, ESA meeting, set for April 7-10 at South Lake Tahoe. Then she will display the poster again in the Undergraduate Research Conference at UC Davis on April 24 in Wellman Hall.
By itself, the beetle, native to Arizona, California, New Mexico and Mexico, does little or no damage. But when coupled with the newly described fungus, Geosmithia morbida, it is killing thousands of walnut trees.
The disease is creating havoc throughout much of the western United States, Seybold said, and is now heading east. Its primary host is the black walnut tree but it also attacks other walnut trees.
“Male WTB initiate new galleries and produce an aggregation pheromone, which can be used to study patterns of initial host colonization behavior of WTB. It has been previously shown by Graves and colleagues (2010) that as the number of males in a branch is increased from 20 to 200, the flight response of males and females is similarly increased,” she wrote. “We investigated flight responses to lower numbers of males in cut branch sections of northern California black walnut, Juglans hindsii.”
Her objective: “To determine the minimum number of males in an artificially infested branch of Juglans hindsii necessary to elicit a flight response from WTB.” She found that as little as one to five males is enough to elicit the aggregation response at her field study sites at two locations in Davis.
The poster will be displayed on the third floor of Briggs Hall, just outside the Department of Entomology’s administration office.
On her poster, Tatiossian credits Seybold; Extension entomologist Mary Louise Flint, associate director for Urban and Community IPM, UC Statewide Integrated Pest Program; entomology graduate student Stacy Hishinuma, and postdoctoral researcher Yigen Chen of the UC Davis Department of Entomology.
And the UC Davis Art/Science Fusion Program where the tiny walnut twig beetle sprang to life.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's exciting to see a promising career unfold.
We first met UC Davis graduate student Alex Van Dam in 2010 when he received a $12,000 award from the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS), an academic research institute dedicated to encouraging, securing, and contributing to binational and Latino research and collaborative academic programs and exchanges.
Then later in 2010 he received a Robert and Peggy van den Bosch Memorial Scholarship for his research on a scale insect. His project: "Investigating Host-Associated Lineage Splitting Within Dactylopius Using Molecular Phylogenetics."
Now Van Dam has just been selected for a National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on insect/host plant research.
The postdoctoral fellowship award is supported by both the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Office of International Science and Engineering at NSF. During his two-year fellowship, he will work on a project, “New Insights into Insect Host-Plant Generalization: Population Transcriptome Sequencing of Porphyrophora spp.,” under the sponsorship of Uffe H. Mortensen at the Department of Systems Biology, Technical University of Denmark.
Van Dam will identify genes responsible for host-plant range in scale insects, and how they are maintained across populations. “This will be accomplished by testing hypotheses delineating physiological genes responsible for insect host-plant generalization,” he said. “Host-plant generalization is the ability to feed on many different species of plants. I will test if increased dispersal of host-plant detoxification genes in generalists leads to maintenance of functional gene paralogs, that is, gene duplications, across large effective populations.
A native of Los Angeles, Van Dam received his bachelor's degree and master's degree in entomology at UC Riverside and is currently a doctoral candidate and a member of the Entomology Graduate Group. He studies with major professor Bernie May in the Department of Animal Science. Professors Jay Rosenheim and Steve Nadler of the Department of Entomology are members of his dissertation committee.
Meanwhile, Van Dam is gearing up for his exit seminar at the Animal Science Spring Seminar Series. He'll present his seminar on Monday, April 29 from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in Weir Room 2154, Meyer Hall.
Another great success story!