This bug's for you.

And this one, too.

And that one over there!

When UC Davis employees and their offspring visited the Bohart Museum of Entomology during the recent "Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work" Day, reactions ranged from awe to "wow!"

They held walking sticks (stick insects), Madagascar hissing cockroaches and tomato hornworms. Two youngsters held  tarantulas. And all checked out the butterfly and beetle specimens.

One little girl, Olivia Bingen, 4, who was there with her father, Steve Bingen of the UC Davis Department of Music, was dressed in pink and asked the Bohart scientists if they had any pink butterflies.

"She likes pink," her father said. She also likes to play the violin.

The Bohart Museum of Entomology, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, UC Davis campus, houses a global collection of nearly eight million insect specimens. It also includes a gift shop and a live “petting zoo,” comprised of Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects and tarantulas.

The museum, founded in 1946 by the late Richard M. Bohart and now directed by Lynn Kimsey, UC Davis professor of entomology, is open to the public from 9 a.m. to noon and from 1 to 5 p.m., Mondays through Fridays, except on holidays. Admission is free.

Special weekend events, free and family friendly, are held throughout the year. The next weekend event is Moth Night from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 3. Blacklighting will take place just outside the museum. Inside, the attendees will visit the museum's displays and, outside, they will see what insects are attracted to the black-lighted white sheets.

Among those scheduled to host Moth Night are John "Moth Man" DeBenedictis; senior museum scientist Steve Heydon; entomologist Jeff Smith, who curates the Lepitopdera (butterflies and moths) section of the Bohart; and Greg Kareofelas, Bohart associate and naturalist.

Insects can tell us a lot about human longevity.

James R. Carey, UC Davis distinguished professor of entomology, will discuss "What Can Insect Studies Tell Us about Longevity and Aging? Lots!" at his UC Davis Emeriti Association presentation at 11:30 a.m., Thursday, May 9 in the Walter A. Buehler Alumni Center, 530 Alumni Lane.

 Among the topics he will cover:

• Are there lifespan limits?
• Evolution of lifespan extremes
• Male-female longevity differences
• Evolutionary demography of humans as informed by insect studies
• Three raging controversies in the demography of aging and lifespan in humans

Jeanne Calment of France (1875-1997), who died at age 122 (and 164 days), holds the record of the longest confirmed human lifespan.

An internationally recognized leader and distinguished scholar in insect demography and invasion biology, spanning three decades, Carey also researches health demography, biology of aging, and lifespan theory. He is the author of a landmark study published in the journal Science in 1992 that showed mortality of Mediterranean fruit flies (medflies) slows at older ages. Scientists last year confirmed that this also occurs in humans, citing the study of 105-year-old Italian women.

Carey, who joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology (now Entomology and Nematology) in 1980, directed an 11-university, $10 million, 10-year study on biodemography of aging from 2003-2013. He is also known for discovering Carey's Equality or the death distribution in a life table population equals its age structure. He teaches a popular longevity course that draws 250 to 300 students year, and recently authored a book on biodemography, to be published by Princeton University next year.

Carey drew a large, enthusiastic crowd at his Science Café presentation Oct.10 on "Are There Upper Limits to Human Lifespan?” in the G St. Wunderbar, Davis.

His talk on May 9 is open to all interested persons, according to UC Davis Retiree Center acting director Becky Heard. Those who opt for lunch, however, must RSVP by Monday, May 6 to the UC Davis Retiree Center at (530) 752-5182 or retireecenter@ucdavis.edu.

Are you ready for the eighth annual UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day on Saturday, Feb. 16 when 13 museums and collections will be open on the University of California, Davis, campus?

The event, free, family friendly and educational, is always held on Presidents' Day weekend. It's billed as a time "to meet and talk with UC Davis scientists from undergraduate students to staff to emeritus professors and see amazing objects and organisms from the world around us."

The times will be staggered. Some collections will be open from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., and others, from noon to 4 p.m. Here's a list of what you can see, with links to their websites:

Want a peek at what happened last year? See the YouTube video, the work of UC Davis student Alexander Fisher-Wagner.

There will be plenty of attractions for youngsters, including the insect petting zoo at the Bohart Museum; dinosaur bones at the Paleontology Collection; carnivorous plants at the Conservatory; Vegemite and Kombucha (to eat!) at the Yeast Collection; demonstrations of eagles and hawks and other birds at the Raptor Center; prehistoric tool demonstrations (flint knapping, atlatl throwing) at tje Anthropology Collection; leaf rubbing and olive wreath crown making at the Arboretum; insect vacuum for observation at the Bee Haven, and pine cone petting zoo at the Herbarium.

Yes, you can pet stick insects at the Bohart Museum and pet pine cones at the Herbarium.

Meanwhile, you can find more information on the Biodiversity Museum Day website. (More information is pending)

"Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Girls have picked them every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?"
--Pete Seeger

The late folksinger and social activist Pete Seeger (1919-2014) sounded many alarms, but a recent article in the New York Times Magazine struck a different but somewhat similar chord: the declining population of insects worldwide.

Brooke Jarvis's piece on "The Insect Apocalypse Is Here," published Nov. 27, should be required reading.

Basically: Where have all the insects gone? What does it mean? Why haven't we noticed? And what are we going to do about it?

Well, butterfly guru/entomologist Art Shapiro, distinguished emeritus professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, has noticed. Shapiro has monitored butterfly population trends on a transect across central California for 46 years and maintains a research website at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/. The 10 sites stretch from the Sacramento River Delta through the Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada mountains to the high desert of the Western Great Basin. Shapiro visits his sites every two weeks "to record what's out" from spring to fall. 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, a member of the UC Davis faculty since 1971 and author of the book, Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento Valley Regions, has studied a total of 163 species of butterflies in his transect. In his May 26, 2018 address at the second annual Butterfly Summit at Annie's Annuals and Perennials, Richmond, he commented that "in a nutshell, at low elevations, butterfly faunas have been declining slowly until 1999. In 1999, 17 species had an abrupt fall in abundance, spontaneously. On its face, this was a non-random event. The decline was then rapid from 1999 to the onset of the recent drought and then things went up again." Shapiro also addressed climate change in a Sept. 6, 2018 interview with Capital Public Radio.

In her article, Jarvis related: "In October, an entomologist sent me an email with the subject line, “Holy [expletive]!” and an attachment: a study just out from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that he labeled, “Krefeld comes to Puerto Rico.”  (See news article on Krefeld's "Insect Armageddon.")

That entomologist was Art Shapiro.

Pesticides, loss of habitat, diseases, climate change, and human encroachment--and more--are some of the reasons why our global population of insects is dwindling.

Shapiro, who engaged in a 90-minute conversation with author Jarvis (and suggested topics and interviews for the piece), is quoted as having one of the few long-term data sets about insect abundance in the United States.

"In 1972, he began walking transects in the Central Valley and the Sierras, counting butterflies," Jarvis wrote. "He planned to do a study on how short-term weather variations affected butterfly populations. But the longer he sampled, the more valuable his data became, offering a signal through the noise of seasonal ups and downs. 'And so here I am in Year 46,' he said, nearly half a century of spending five days a week, from late spring to the end of autumn, observing butterflies. In that time he has watched overall numbers decline and seen some species that used to be everywhere — even species that 'everyone regarded as a junk species' only a few decades ago — all but disappear. Shapiro believes that Krefeld-level declines are likely to be happening all over the globe. 'But, of course, I don't cover the entire globe,' he added. 'I cover I-80.'"

Jarvis quotes plant ecologist Hans de Kroon of Radboud University, the Netherlands, as characterizing the life of many modern insects as trying to survive from one dwindling oasis to the next but with “a desert in between, and at worst it's a poisonous desert.”

Why should we care? As Jarvis succinctly points out: "Insects are the vital pollinators and recyclers of ecosystems and the base of food webs everywhere."

So true.

Now the concern should not only be "Where have all the insects gone?" but "What are we going to do about it?"