Talk about an early bloomer!

At least one almond tree was blooming in California on the first day of the year. In the Benicia State Recreation Area, to be exact.

We spotted the almond tree flowering on Jan. 1 near the entrance to the state park. The delicate white blossoms poked through a rusty fence as they were dignitaries at a meet-and-greet reception.

From the looks of the blossoms, the buds had probably opened in late December, maybe shortly after Christmas. 

We're accustomed to seeing wild almond trees flowering in mid- to late January as we drive along Interstate 80, Solano County. But not this early! Jan. 1?

California's commercial almond trees usually begin blooming around Valentine's Day, Feb. 14. Our state has about 800,000 acres of almonds, each acre requires two hives for pollination. The buzzing bees are trucked here from all over the country. Indeed, California's $3 billion-almond industry--the state's largest export--is pure gold.

Meanwhile, it's too bad that there's no contest for finding the first almond tree blooming. Butterfly expert Art Shapiro, professor of ecology and evolution at UC Davis, sponsors a contest for anyone collecting the first cabbage white butterfly in the three-county area of Yolo, Solano and Sacramento.  The prize he offers is a pitcher of beer.

Maybe there should be beer for a bud?

There's only one thing wrong with the bucolic scenes below: no foraging bees. But there will be. 

Sometimes we divide insects into "the biggest and the baddest."

Such will be the case Sunday, Jan. 13 when the Bohart Museum of Entomology, University of California, Davis, hosts an open house from 1 to 4 p.m., in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge building.

The theme: "Extreme Insects!" That's with an exclamation point because these insects are indeed extreme, meaning quite out of the ordinary. 

The event is free and open to the public.

Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum and a UC Davis professor of entomology, says "the biggest and the baddest" include:

• Greatest wingspan – the white witch moth from Central America (11 inches)
• Heaviest beetle – the African goliath beetle (2 ounces, and fist-sized)
• Loudest insect – the American cicada (108 decibels, as loud as a power saw or rock concert)
• Fastest flier – horseflies (more than 80 miles per hour)
• Most painful sting – the tarantula hawk wasp
• Deadliest insect – the house fly for vectoring more than 250 different human pathogens
• Fastest runner – the tiger beetle at 5 miles per hour
• Deadliest insect – the harvester ant, sting 3 times as toxic as honey bee venom
• Most beautiful moth – the moon moths and rainbow moths

The Bohart Museum houses a global collection of nearly eight million insect specimens and is the seventh largest insect collection in North America. It is also the home of the California Insect Survey, a storehouse of the insect biodiversity. Noted entomologist Richard M. Bohart (1913-2007) founded the museum in 1946. 

Bohart officials schedule weekend open houses throughout the academic year so that families and others who cannot attend on the weekdays can do so on the weekends. The Bohart’s regular hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and from 1 to 5 p.m., Monday through Thursday.  The insect museum is closed to the public on Fridays and on major holidays. Admission is free.  

The Bohart Museum also includes a gift shop where visitors can purchase t-shirts, sweatshirts, posters, insect nets, books and jewelry. A live "petting zoo" features Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and tarantulas.

The Academic Surge building is located on Crocker Avenue, formerly California Drive. 

The remainder of the open houses for the 2012-2013 academic year are:

Saturday, Feb. 2, 1 to 4 p.m.
Theme: "Biodiversity Museum Day"

Sunday, March 24, 1 to 4 p.m.
Theme: "Aquatic Insects"

Saturday, April 20: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Theme: UC Davis Picnic Day

Saturday, May 11, 1 to 4 p.m.
Theme: "Moth-er's Day"

Sunday, June 9, 1 to 4 p.m.
Theme: "How to Find Insects"

For further information, contact Lynn Kimsey at lskimsey@ucdavis.edu or senior museum scientist Steve Heydon at slheydon@ucdavis.edu. The Bohart phone number: (530) 752-0493.

Directions

It's a case of a sticky situation benefitting a plant.

Or more precisely, dead fruit flies or carrion on a tarweed plant can benefit the plant in more ways that most people would ever think about, say researchers in the UC Davis Department of Entomology.

Just as human tourists can be good for the economy, ‘insect tourists” can be good for a plant. 

When the hairs of a “sticky plant” trap small insects or “insect tourists,” the “tourist trap” provides food for other predators, thus becoming a defensive mechanism that spares the plant from increased herbivore damage. Other beneficial results include greater plant fitness and increased fruit production.

“We conducted a large, simple field experiment to test the hypothesis that plant-trapped insects could enhance indirect defense by increasing predator densities,” said ecologist Billy Krimmel, a graduate student in the Jay Rosenheim lab, who worked with fellow ecologist Ian Pearse of the Richard Karban lab. Pearse is now a postdoctoral fellow in Walter Koenig’s laboratory at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

“Sticky plants-- those producing resinous, oily or hooked trichomes (hairs)--often entrap small insects that land on them as they pass by,” Krimmel said. “This insect carrion functions as a type of plant-provided food for defense.”

“This is the first example of such a plant-provided food being captured from the external environment,” Krimmel said. “We coined the term 'tourist trap', referring to the sticky hairs that catch insect passers-by.”

In their research, “Sticky Plant Traps Insects to Enhance Indirect Defence,” published in the journal Ecology Letters, the ecologists revealed that the trapped insect tourists “increased the abundance of a suite of predators, decreased herbivory and increased plant fitness.”

Later the journal Nature focused on the Krimmel-Pearse research in its ecology section: "When Plants Run the Food Chain."

"We believe that carrion may be an overlooked, but generally important component of food webs and plant-herbivore interactions,” said Pearse, noting that “most studies ignore insects after they die, but the presence of their carrion may be an important component of food webs.”

 "We have known for a long time that carnivorous plants entrap insects for their own benefit,” Pearse said. “In our current study, we found that the entrapment of insects by plants might be even more important and general than previously thought."

Krimmel and Pearse conducted their research in the Stebbens Cold Canyon Reserve, a UC Davis Nature Reserve located in Solano County, near the outlet of Lake Berryessa. Their sticky plant was tarweed (Madia elegans), an annual flowering California native plant in the family Asteraceae. It generally flowers in mid to late summer, from approximately June through September.

At our study site, tarweed's major herbivore is the specialist caterpillar Heliothodes diminutiva, which feeds largely on plant reproductive organs and can completely sterilise its host plants,” they wrote.  The adult owlet moth, Heliothodes diminutive,  lays its eggs on the developing buds. The emerging caterpillars can quickly devour all the flowers and buds.

 “The suite of predators commonly found on tarweed,” they wrote, “includes the assassin bug Pselliopus spinicollis, two stilt bugs Hoplinus echinatus and Jalysus wickhami, the green lynx spider Peucetia sp. and the crab spider Mecaphesa schlingeri. All can navigate tarweed's sticky surface.”

Krimmel and Pearse chose 82 tarweed plants for their experiment. They placed dead Drosophila fruit flies to half of them, five flies per week through the growing season, and then monitored all the plants throughout the growing season.

“Because tarweed is a small, annual plant, we were able to do full counts of arthropods on all plants each week, and measure lifetime fruit production by the plants, allowing us to relate our experimental treatment to plant lifetime fitness,” the authors wrote.

“The addition of 5 dead fruit flies (carrion) to plants each week over the growing season increased the abundance of all surveyed predatory arthropods associated with M. elegans plants by 76 percent to 450 percent,. For P. spinoicollis, the most abundant predator, this effect was strongest during the early growth season in June and July.”

Specifically, “the addition of carrion (fruit flies) to M. elegans plants produced a 60 percent decrease in bud damage caused by H. diminutiva, the dominant lepidopteran herbivore in this system and increased lifetime fruit production by 10 percent,” the researchers said.

Jay Rosenheim's USDA research grant helped fund the project. Krimmel received two other grants: a National Science Foundation/Graduate Research Fellowship  and a Jastro-Shields Research Scholarship.

The dengue research news coming out of medical entomologist Thomas Scott's lab at the University of California, Davis, is certainly exciting.

And compelling.

In an article published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the UC Davis medical entomologists and their colleagues found that human movement—people going from house-to-house to visit their friends and relatives—is a key component to driving the virus transmission. (Read PNAS paper)

The research site is Iquitos, nestled in the heart of the Amazon rain forest of northeastern Peru. It's considered one of the world’s primary “open laboratories” to study the transmission of the virus. 

The Aedes aegypti mosquito is a day-biting mosquito and we humans are its favorite host/target. 

The ground-breaking research shows why it's crucial to focus on people movement, not just on the traditional mosquito control-and-prevention methods, such as applying insecticides and eliminating water-filled containers that can provide a larval habitat.

As lead author/medical entomologist Steve Stoddard said: "This finding has important implications for dengue prevention, challenging the appropriateness of current approaches to vector control."

“Interestingly, it didn’t matter how far away the visited houses were," Stoddard said. "The mosquito that transmits dengue virus prefers to stay in small areas, say in less than a 100-meter radius, but the distance between houses was often much greater than this. So it only makes sense that humans are frequently spreading the virus around as they commute between their homes and the homes of their friends and family. Altogether the data demonstrate what we expected, that human movements are really key to the transmission of this mosquito-borne virus.” 

Said Scott, professor of entomology at UC Davis and director of the Mosquito Research Laboratory: “Dengue takes an enormous toll on human health worldwide, with as many as 4 billion people at risk—half of the world’s population--and 400 million new infections each year. The results from our study are focusing attention to the role human social networks in virus invasion and epidemic spread.

"At our Peru study area, we found that infection risk is based on the places a person visits and transmission dynamics are driven by overlapping movements of people who recently visited the same places, like the homes of their family and friends.” 

Bottom line:  The scientists found that people movement not only defined individual infection risk and local patterns of incidence, but resulted in the rapid spread of the virus and marked heterogeneity in transmission rates.

Next phase of the research? It's aimed at "understanding how variation in human behavior influences transmission and applying that knowledge in enhanced disease prevention strategies,” said Scott, the principal investigator of a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded grant.

With some 4 billion people worldwide at risk, and with 400,000 million new infections each year, dengue is indeed taking its toll. Every year some 500,000 people with severe dengue are hospitalized, and 2.5 percent die.