The public will benefit from the Bohart Museum of Entomology's UC Davis Crowd Fund, a $5000 fundraising drive that ends at 11:59 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 31.

With the funds, UC Davis students will create portable insect-specimen traveling boxes that make their way throughout Northern California to help folks learn about the exciting world of insect science, including bees, butterflies and beetles. The glass-topped boxes travel to school classrooms, youth group meetings (such as 4-H, Boy Scouts and Grange), festivals, libraries, fairs, special events, museums, hospitals--and more.

The Bohart Museum, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, originated in 1946 when noted entomologist Richard M. Bohart (1913-2007), UC Davis professor of entomology, filled two Schmitt boxes with insect specimens. That was the beginning of the UC Davis insect museum. Named the Bohart Museum in 1982, it is now the home of nearly eight million insect specimens, collected worldwide

Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart and a UC Davis distinguished professor of entomology, drew praise last Saturday at the museum's 75h anniversary party, hosted by the Bohart Museum Society.

Emcee Jason Bond, the Evert and Marion Schlinger Endowed Chair and professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and the newly named Associate Dean for Research and Outreach for Agricultural Sciences, UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, urged the crowd to help support the outreach mission of the museum. 

 “Collections have a tremendous educational value,” Bond said, “and they also have amazing research value as well. Discoveries of new species don't actually happen in the field, they happen in the museum collections. New species on the average spend about 25 years on the shelf before a graduate student, undergraduate student or a researcher pulls them off shelf and describes or discovers them.” 

He offered a toast to Kimsey, who in turn praised the thousands of collectors “who have their names” on the specimens. “We've been doing this for a long time. Eventually we'll be able to serve the public again like we should. Otherwise it would just be a dead collection in a building somewhere.” 

Kimsey interviewed “Doc” Bohart, then 82, in 1996 as part of the Aggie Videos collection. (See https://bit.ly/2Zv8rvO.) Bohart, who began his UC Davis career in 1946, chaired the Department of Entomology from 1963 to 1967.

Unparalleled Research. “His scientific research on insect taxonomy and systematics is unparalleled,” Kimsey wrote on the Bohart website. “His publications include three of the most important books on the systematics of the Hymenoptera, including the well-used volume  Sphecid Wasps of the World. His journal publications total over 200 articles. He revised many groups of insects, discovered new host-associations or geographic ranges, and described many new species." 

Kimsey, an alumnus of UC Davis, received her undergraduate degree in 1975 and doctorate in 1979. She joined the UC Davis faculty in 1989. A two-term president of the International Hymenopterists, and a recognized global authority on the systematics, biogeography and biology of the wasp families, Tiphiidae and Chrysididae, she won the 2020 C. W. Woodworth Award, the highest award given by the Pacific Branch of the Entomological Society of America, for "her 31 years of outstanding accomplishments in research, teaching, education, outreach and public service."

The need to update and expand the Bohart Museum's traveling display is urgent, the scientists said. 

“We have all these bright, students on campus with fresh and diverse perspectives," commented Tabatha Yang, the Bohart Museum's education and outreach coordinator. "We want to support their talent, so the funds we are raising will go to students for the creation of new traveling displays. This fleet of new educational drawers will expand and update what we can offer. Some of our current displays were created 15 years ago! One can only imagine all the places these drawers have been and all the people who have been inspired." 

Donors can do so in memory of someone, a place, or a favorite insect. Bond donated $500 in honor of Lynn Kimsey, and Lynn Kimsey donated $500 in memory of the founder, Richard M. Bohart.  The donation page, which includes a U.S. map of where the donors reside, is at https://bit.ly/3v4MoaJ  

The Bohart Museum, currently closed to the public due to COVID-19 precautions, is located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus. In addition to its insect collection, which is the seventh largest in North America, the museum houses a live “petting zoo,” comprised of Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects and tarantulas, and a gift shop (now online), stocked with insect-themed t-shirts, hoodies, jewelry, books, posters and other items. Further information is on the website at https://bohart.ucdavis.edu.

Allan Jones capturing images of insects. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

Well, if your name is Allan Jones of Davis, Calif., and you capture images of insects throughout the year--especially at the 100-acre UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden and the half-acre Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven on Bee Biology Road--and you like to carve pumpkins as an art form, you know that insects and pumpkins go together. They go together very well. 

Almost every year Jones carves fanciful pumpkins showcased in the Common Grounds coffee house at 2171 Cowell Blvd., Suite F.  "So amazing!" said Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator for the Bohart Museum of Entomology at UC Davis, who recently stopped by the coffee house and admired Jones' creations. 

"They generally are based on some coffee-related theme," Jones related. "This year I drew on a photo that lingered in my mind of a praying mantis leaning around a sunflower to go shopping for bees. It's a trick or treat, or maybe a bad-things-brewing situation."

"So I've gone back and found the source photo and it is nothing like the pumpkin image I've conjured from memory. But the story is still pretty much on point with artistic liberties taken with insect and flower anatomy."

How he does it: "I 'surface carve' each pumpkin like a wood carving with a v-gouge, then color them. This way they last a month or more as coffee house decorations. Most are coffee-joke pumpkins but I also like to carve natural subjects for fun, too." 

An alumnus of UC Davis, Allan became an Aggie in 1961, receiving degrees in English and German in 1966, and his master's in English in 1972. He joined the doctoral program in 1973 "but I quit in 1974, making my summer job of inspecting tomatoes my career for 43 seasons (with California Department of Food and Agriculture for half of my career and then working with CDFA on an independent advisory board). I did some workmanlike macro photography of tomato defects and wider shots of the inspection process for training.“

Allan spent the ‘70s in Dixon, and the ‘80s and ‘90s in Sacramento “before moving back to Davis after 2000.” 

The UC Davis alumnus also created art with the UC Davis Art and Science Fusion Program, launched and directed by the duo of entomology professor Diane Ullman of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and self-described "rock artist" Donna Billick of Davis. Their campus and community projects are permanent displayed over much of the UC Davis campus, including the Arboretum and the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology's bee garden, the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven.

Entomologist Christine Melvin dressed as a monarch.

The work of entomologist Christine Melvin, a graduate of UC Davis, the banner features a hover fly, sphecid wasp, snakefly, bumble bee, aphid, twisted wing parasite and a tardigrade (water bear). 

Melvin's artist statement: "It was a pleasure to create an image in honor of the 75th anniversary for the Bohart Museum of Entomology. I spent countless hours at the museum as an undergraduate student and learned so much from so many people who all shared a love for entomology. I wanted the image to include a diverse group of insects, a few California native plants and a banner; all in a heart shape of sorts. The bleeding heart flowers on the left are being visited by a hover fly from the order Diptera. The California poppies on the right have a thread-waisted wasp from the order Hymenoptera on top. On the stem of one of the poppies is an aphid from the order Hemiptera that is being hunted by a snakefly (far right) from the order Neuroptera. In the center of the image, flax flowers are being visited by Franklin's bumble bee, from the order Hymenoptera, in honor of the late Dr. Robbin Thorp. At the bottom right is a tardigrade, which visitors will find a statue of outside the museum building. Finally on the lower left-hand side is a twisted-winged parasite, from the order Strepsiptera, in honor of Dr. Bohart himself."

The Bohart Museum's tardigrade collection includes some 25,000 slide-mounted specimens. It ties in with the 2,112-pound tardigrade sculpture, created by artist Solomon Bassoff of Nevada County, that graces the entrance to the Bohart Museum.

Melvin, who received her degree in the spring of 2017 and moved to the Big Island in July 2019, is on track to receive her master's degree in entomology (distance-learning)  through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  

"Shortly after moving here, the pandemic began which allowed me a rare chance of living in Hawaii when there were no tourists; I am truly grateful for that experience," she related. "The down-time from the pandemic has also allowed me to really focus on my MS degree which will be complete in the spring of 2022."

For her master's project, she will create an illustrated guide to the butterflies of Northern Yosemite with a heavy emphasis on life history and citizen science. "I am still working on the title," Melvin said. "The courses taken to complete my MS degree included specialized and general entomology, scientific illustration and science communication. It is my goal to make this the first of many entomology focused and illustrated publications to encourage and honor citizen science."

"I will be returning to the mainland in January of 2022 because as much as I love Hawaii, there are more insects on the mainland and I miss them!"

Bohart Museum and Director Toasted. Rain dampened the Crocker Lane event but not the enthusiasm as the crowd toasted the work of the Bohart Museum and its director Lynn Kimsey, UC Davis distinguished professor of entomology.  

Lynn Kimsey, director of Bohart Museum

“We should take a moment to not only express our appreciation of the Bohart Museum and the legacy that Dr. Richard Bohart left, but to all the work Lynn has done to make events like this possible and to continue the important work,” emcee Jason Bond, the Evert and Marion Schlinger Endowed Chair and professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, told the crowd. 

Bond, who was named Associate Dean for Research and Outreach for Agricultural Sciences, the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences on Oct. 25, said museum collections have “tremendous educational value and they also have amazing research value as well.” 

CrowdFund Project. Bond urged the crowd to help support the outreach mission of the museum. Bohart Museum scientists are seeking donations for their traveling insect specimen displays. They aim to raise $5000 by 11:59 p.m., Oct. 31 for their UC Davis CrowdFund project to purchase traveling display boxes for their specimens, which include bees, butterflies and beetles. These are portable glass-topped display boxes that travel throughout Northern California to school classrooms, youth group meetings, festivals, events, museums, hospitals--and more--to help people learn about the exciting world of insect science.

 “When COVID halted our in-person outreach programs, we were still able to safely loan these educational materials to teachers,” said Tabatha Yang, the Bohart Museum's education and outreach coordinator.  “Now that UC Davis is open again to students we have all these bright, students on campus with fresh and diverse perspectives. We want to support their talent, so the funds we are raising will go to students for the creation of new traveling displays. This fleet of new educational drawers will expand and update what we can offer. Some of our current displays were created 15 years ago! One can only imagine all the places these drawers have been and all the people who have been inspired."

Donors can do so in memory of someone, a place, or a favorite insect. Bond donated $500 in honor of Lynn Kimsey. The donation page and map are at https://bit.ly/3v4MoaJ  

The Bohart Museum, currently closed to the public due to COVID-19 precautions, is located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane. In addition to its insect collection, the seventh largest in North America, it houses a live “petting zoo,” comprised of Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects and tarantulas, and a gift shop (now online), stocked with insect-themed t-shirts, hoodies, jewelry, books, posters and other items. Further information is on the website at https://bohart.ucdavis.edu.

Parasitologist Adler Dillman of UC Riverside

Who knew that you, along with billions of other people, could be infected with undetected microscopic parasitic nematodes, or round worms? And that they spit venom?

Parasitologist Adler Dillman of UC Riverside knows. In fact, he recently received a $1.8 million Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study these parasitic nematodes, which infect a quarter of a billion of the world's population and can cause blindness, cognitive issues and sometimes death.

Want to learn more about this research? The UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology has booked him as a guest speaker as part of its fall weekly seminars, coordinated by nematologist and assistant professor Shahid Siddique.

Dillman will deliver his in-person seminar, "Nematode Venom Contains Potent Modulators of Insect Immunity," at 4:10 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 27 in 122 Briggs Hall Drive, off Kleiber Hall Drive.  It also will be broadcast live on Zoom at https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/99515291076.

"Parasitic nematodes are master manipulators of host immunity," Dillman says in his abstract. "Little is known about the identity and function of the cocktail of effectors they release during active infection. We have developed an effector discovery model using entomopathogenic nematodes and fruit flies, which we are using to identify and characterize potent modulators of insect immunity."

Dillman, who joined the UC Riverside faculty in February 2015 and is now an associate professor, focuses his research on identifying the specific proteins in a nematode's spit or venom that can trick the immune system to ignore its presence. His model organism is the fruit fly. He hopes that his research could lead to treatments for autoimmune diseases in humans, such as celiac, Crohn's or inflammatory bowel diseases.

UC Riverside featured him, his NIH grant and his research in a press release "Parasitic Worm Venom Evades Human Immune System," posted July 20, 2020 on EurekAlert. "By some estimates, nearly a quarter of the world's population is infected with various types of microscopic worms, or nematodes, with effects ranging from cognitive impairment and blindness to debilitation, elephantiasis, and death," writer Jules Berstein of UC Riverside related. "Examples include hookworm, which thrives in the American South, causing developmental delays and anemia; and pinworms, which commonly infect children and child care workers with an itchy perianal-area rash."

"You can have a person riddled with infection who never realized there's a 2-centimeter-long worm in their eye and thousands of parasites in their blood," Dlllman told her. "The immune system never signaled something was wrong. How is that possible? We know very little about how that works."

Devastating Parasites. Nematodes, he says, are "devastating parasites of humans, capable of modulating our biology in numerous ways, including suppressing our immune systems. The goal of my lab is to understand this modulation and to characterize the chemical pathways that allow it to happen. There's compelling data that parasites could even be used to treat autoimmune disorders such as Crohn's or inflammatory bowel disease. Parasitic worms are just the coolest things you could study because there are so many strange interactions, both positive and negative, that occur between the worms and their hosts."

Aylin Woodward of Business Insider spotlighted Dillman's work in a Sept. 13, 2020 news story headlined "A Scientist Won $1.8 Million to Study the Venom Parasitic Worms Use to Live Undetected in Our Bodies. He Thinks It Could Help Treat Celiac Disease. The Dillman lab is "looking at 500 or so different types of proteins released by nematodes that infect fruit flies," she wrote, quoting Dillman: "Flies are cheaper and easier to work with, and the parasites that affect insects release the same proteins as those that infect mammals."

"An analysis of research on this subject, published in 2017, described how the presence of nematodes and other parasites can lower inflammation in IBD and reduce the severity of multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, asthma, and rheumatoid arthritis in animals," Woodward pointed out. "A 2010 study, in fact, described a patient with IBD who deliberately infected himself with a parasitic worm called a whipworm. The man's immune system started producing a type of protein crucial to healing his digestive tract, and the disease went into remission."

Dillman received his doctorate in 2012 from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), a private research university in Pasadena, and then served as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford from 2013 to 2014. He holds a bachelor's degree (2006) from Brigham Young University. 

Shahid Siddique may be reached at ssiddique@ucdavis.edu.