- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Who doesn't love jumping spiders?
They're adorable. No? Well, they are to arthropod enthusiasts, but not so much to their prey.
This one (probably a Phidippus audax, a Bold Jumper) was moving slowly and unobtrusively up a shadowed Vacaville stucco wall on the morning of Jan. 2.
It may have been hunting for prey or simply seeking some sun.
The jumping spider, family Salticidae, is a thing of beauty, but to some folks it's a thing of fright.
Did you catch science writer James Gorman's article on How the Jumping Spider Sees Its Prey in the Nov. 6, 2018 edition of The New York Times?
"If you love spiders, you will really love jumping spiders," Gordon began, humorously adding that "If you hate spiders, try reading this article on dandelions."
"O.K., if you're still here, jumping spiders are predators that stalk their prey and leap on them, like a cat. They are smart, agile and have terrific eyesight."
Gorman pointed out that "It has been clear for a long time that their vision is critical to the way they hunt, and to the accuracy of their leaps. But a lot has remained unknown about the way their eyes work together." He then detailed the newly published research on spider vision by Elizabeth Jakob of the University of Massachusetts and her colleagues.
"Jumping spiders have eight eyes," Gorman gently reminded his readers (who were probably already reading about dandelions). "Two big eyes, right in the center of what you might call the spider's forehead, are the principal ones, and they pick up detail and color. Of the other three pairs, a rear set looks backward, a middle set is as yet a bit of a mystery, and the foremost detect motion."
The spider we saw on the stucco wall certainly detected our motion.
Somewhat like the phrase attributed to Julius Cesar's "I came, I saw, I conquered," our spider "came, jumped and vanished."
Goodbye, spider.
And no, I'm not going to read that article on dandelions.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Have you seen any overwintering milkweed bugs lately?
About a dozen milkweed bugs, Oncopeltus fasciatus, emerged from seclusion Jan. 2, 2022 in our Vacaville garden. The temperature hovered at 32 degrees that morning, but when the sun peeked out, there they were. Mating.
Little early, aren't ya, buddies? If you're waiting for the first milkweed seeds, get set for a long wait.
Jack Frost nailed what was left of most of our milkweed. So where are the colorful reddish-orange/black bugs overwintering? In our nearby cacti and succulents.
Milkweed bugs are known as "seed eaters" of milkweed, but actually they are opportunistic and generalists, according to Hugh Dingle, emeritus professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis. In a September 2019 Bug Squad blog, Dingle told us they will eat monarch eggs and larvae (milkweed is the host plant of monarchs), as well as the oleander aphids that infest the milkweed.
"Milkweed bugs will get protein from wherever they can find it," said Dingle, an insect migration biologist and author of the textbook, Animal Migration: the Biology of Life on the Move. They've been known to feed on insects trapped in the sticky pollen of the showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa). And on nectar.
Dingle served on the UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty from 1982 to 2002, achieving emeritus status in 2003. National Geographic featured him in its cover story on “Great Migrations” in November 2010. LiveScience interviewed him for its November 2010 piece on “Why Do Animals Migrate?”
But milkweed isn't the only plant that these bugs breed and feed on. "The fascinating thing about milkweed bugs is that they will feed and breed spontaneously on Erysimum and Cheiranthus, two Brassicaceous genera that make cardenolides!" UC Davis butterfly guru Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology, told us this week.
The amazing world of milkweed bugs and the plants they feed and breed on...
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Fischer is a member of the Mosquito Research Group, Department of Ecology, Genetics and Evolution.
Her seminar, open to all interested persons, begins at 4:10 p.m., Pacific Time. She will be introduced by UC Davis doctoral student Erin Taylor Kelly of the laboratory of medical entomologist-geneticist Geoffrey Attardo. The Zoom link is https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/99515291076.
"The mosquito Aedes aegypti, vector of dengue and other arboviruses, has recently expanded its distribution towards colder climate regions," Fischer says in her abstract. "This might be favored by an adaptation of the populations to local conditions. We explore the larval tolerance to low temperatures and the photoperiod induced embryonic diapause as possible mechanisms occurring in temperate Argentina."
"My main research interest is on mosquito ecology, and my current project aims to analyze the effects of environmental conditions (photoperiod, temperature, humidity) and resources (larval food) on the fitness of Aedes aegypti," she writes on ResearchGate. "I am also interested in human caused environmental change and its consequences on vector borne diseases."
She is a member of the
Fischer recently co-authored a research paper on Behavior of Aedes albifasciatus (Diptera: Culicidae) larvae from eggs with different dormancy times and its relationship with parasitism by Strelkovimermis spiculatus (Nematoda: Mermithidae).
A. aegypti is also known as the yellow fever mosquito. Kelly, who is hosting the seminar, studies the mosquito in the Attardo lab. She won a first-place award at the Entomological Society of America meeting last November with her poster, “Metabolic Snapshot: Using Metabolomics to Compare Near-Wild and Colonized Aedes aegypti.” She competed in the Physiology, Biochemistry and Ecology Section. (See https://bit.ly/3HJR0IF).
Fischer's talk meshes with the work of the Geoffrey Attardo laboratory. In one of his research projects, Attardo investigates the threat of these invasive mosquitoes, which have gained a foothold and spread throughout the state, putting California at risk for Aedes-vectored diseases such as dengue, chikungunya, Zika and yellow fever. Attardo studies the prevalence and physiology of insecticide resistance in Californian populations and evaluates the use of genetic markers to predict insecticide resistance and to track movement of genetically independent populations of aegypti throughout the state. Attardo and his lab are also currently developing novel biochemically oriented methods of insecticide resistance quantification to identify compounds that mosquito abatement districts can use for monitoring, and to define the biochemical pathways required to maintain this problematic adaptation.
The department's weekly seminars, held at 4:10 p.m. on Wednesdays, are coordinated by nematologist Shahid Siddique, who may be emailed at ssiddique@ucdavis.edu with any technical questions.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Butterfly guru Art Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor of evolution and ecology, has spotted only one moth and one butterfly since Wednesday, Jan. 5.
Shapiro is the professor who sponsors the annual "Beer for a Butterfly Contest" for scientific research. It works like this: Find the first cabbage white butterfly of the year in Sacramento, Yolo or Solano counties, deliver it live to his department, and if you win, you receive a pitcher of beer or its equivalent. He canceled the contest this year due to rising COVID pandemic concerns.
But he's out looking.
In a group email on Tuesday, Jan. 4, Shapiro wrote that "about 4:50 p.m. a noctuid moth landed on my living-room window. I could see by the thoracic hair tuft that it was a Plusiine of some kind. I went outside to examine it, but it had not really settled in and it flew off. The light was too dim to have any confidence as to the species, except I know it wasn't biloba. First Lep of 2022! It was about 55F and overcast."
On Wednesday, Jan. 5, "it was much less cloudy than expected," Shapiro noted. "I decided to stay around campus and check out the Vanessa territorial sites. I figured there would be cumulus in the afternoon, and there were--they even congealed into broken stratocumulus for a while. It was warmest between noon and 2 p.m., about 60-61F, with a light southerly wind. I didn't find any Vanessas and gave up by 3. But I did see a butterfly! A fresh-looking Agraulis vanillae at the EC (Experimental Community) Gardens."
"At 85% precipitation for the year, with the increased temperatures relative to a baseline mean of 1980-2010, I'd estimate an additional 15% plant water stress over the year (equal to ~60% annual precip from normal). We showed that climatic water deficit goes up, even under future climate forecasts that are wetter, because evaporative demand increases with temperature (Thorne et al. 2015). If it's drier, then that effect is amplified."
"One of the reasons butterflies are such a great study system is how responsive they are to immediate, seasonal and possibly multi-year weather," Thorne wrote. "It would be interesting to look at future climate monthly predictions and measure how those relate to the observed faunal response to the measured changes in weather-climate, to build predictive models. We should have enough track record to make some predictions about faunal phenology under future climate. In the forest restoration world, the break between weather effects (such as a late rain or heat wave) on seedling survival and climate effects on longer-term site environmental conditions and seedling progression to early poly-size is about 5 years. That's an arbitrary line drawn looking at seedling survival/establishment."
Thorne attached a research article he co-authored: The Magnitude and Spatial Patterns of Historical and Future Hydrologic Change in California's Watersheds, published Feb. 12, 2015 in Ecological Society of America's journal, Ecosphere.
Monitoring Since 1972. Shapiro has monitored butterfly population trends on a transect across central California since 1972 and records the information on his research website at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/. His 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. 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 more than 160 species of butterflies in his transect.
Side note: How is Art Shapiro celebrating his birthday? With a "~6% positivity rate and 617 new Covid cases on campus already this year," he said that he is "lying low."
"I will probably celebrate by ordering a pizza," Shapiro said. "Nothing more elaborate, I assure you, and no gathering of any kind. Stay well, stay safe!"
Happy birthday, Art!
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
UC Davis doctoral alumnus Marek Borowiec, now an assistant professor in the University of Idaho's Department of Entomology, Plant Pathology and Nematology, is one of many who drew inspiration from Wilson, the Pulitzer-Prize winning biologist considered "the" global expert on ants.
As a master's student from Poland on a Ernst Mayr grant, Borowiec worked near his office at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ).
Borowiec posted this 10-itemed thread Jan. 4 on his Twitter account:
- "Ed Wilson's passing marks an end of an era. He inspired generations of myrmecologists. Here's my story. I was a biology college freshman in Poland when I read Naturalist. I had already read several of his books and was mostly interested in what he had to say about human nature."
- "Reading Naturalist, however, it seemed to me that Wilson was more excited about chasing ants around the world than toppling paradigms. I thought, 'huh, if this guy thinks ants are so fascinating, there must be something to it.' "
- "On my next walk in a local park I picked up some ants and stuffed them into the toothpick compartment of my Swiss army knife. I identified them using a microscope my parents got me, using an outdated key to insects of USSR."
- "As boring as Lasius niger is, at the time I thought this was the coolest-looking thing I ever saw. My dad, also an entomologist, saw his son's potential path to the dark side and pointed out that a modern key to the ants of Poland had just come out (Radchenko et al 2004)."
- "A year later I had the thing literally memorized. I could run through most of the Myrmica key in my mind without even opening the book. Soon, I was given an opportunity to work for @mil_janda (Milan Janda) who put me in charge of sorting some mind-blowing material from Papua New Guinea."
- "Initially I thought I wanted to study ant ecology but the diversity of shape and form of tropical ants made me want to study systematics. As a Masters student, still in Poland, I went to MCZ on an Ernst Mayr grant and spent two weeks working opposite to Wilson's Harvard office."
- "Ed wasn't around then but Stefan Cover convinced me I should apply to grad school with Phil Ward (who, I believe, was inspired to study ants after reading Wilson's The Insect Societies). Fast forward a couple of years and I landed in Sacramento as a starry-eyed PhD student."
- "I visited MCZ three more times since then and was finally able to meet Ed in 2019. At 90 his enthusiasm was still infectious, his mind enviably lucid for any age. I am grateful to have met him, however briefly."
- "All this has been an incredible adventure. Many supported me early in my professional journey, including but not limited to my parents Marta and Lech Borowiec, Alfred Buschinger, @mil_janda (Milan Janda),@GaryDAlpert1 (Gary D. Albert), Stefan Cover, Phil Ward, @BBlaimer (Bonnie Blaimer), @bramic21 (Michael Branstetter)...
- "But it all starts with Ed's Naturalist."
Borowiec received his doctorate at UC Davis in 2016, studying with major professor and myrmecologist Phil Ward.
"My focus has been primarily on ant diversity and evolution and in my research I combine field work, morphology, molecular phylogenetics and comparative methods," Borowiec writes on his website. "I am also interested in computing and phylogeny estimation from high-throughput sequencing data. Ants are the world's most successful eusocial organisms. Long history, high species diversity and extreme variety of life histories make them an excellent group in which many evolutionary questions can be addressed."
E. O. Wilson influenced so many scientists...
