Mark your calendars for a "parade of parasitoids!"

The Bohart Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Davis, is sponsoring its annual "Parasitoid Palooza" open house on Saturday, Oct. 19 from 1 to 4 p.m. in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane.

"An insect parasitoid is a species whose immatures live off of an insect host, often eating it from the inside out," said Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator of the Bohart Museum. "It is part of their life cycle and the host generally dies."

The event, free and family friendly, will include a display by senior museum scientist Steve Heydon, who studies Pteromalids, or jewel wasps, a group of tiny parasitoids. He will be available for questions about his research or parasitoids.

There are some 3,450 described species of Pteromalids, found throughout the world and in virtually all habitats. Many are important as biological control agents.

Also planned at the open house:

• A family craft activity, to be announced
• Sampling of Chirp Chips, from the Bohart Museum's recent entomophagy open house
• Display of orange and black Harlequin beetles (just in time for Halloween) from the Ian Grettenberger lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
• Display of cucumber beetles, which can be a pest on squashes, cucumbers and other members of the cucurbits family

The Bohart Museum, directed by Lynn Kimsey, professor of entomology at UC Davis, houses a global collection of nearly eight million specimens. It is also the home of the seventh largest insect collection in North America, and the California Insect Survey, a storehouse of the insect biodiversity.

Special attractions include a “live” petting zoo, featuring Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks, praying mantids and tarantulas. Visitors are invited to hold some of the insects and photograph them. The museum's gift shop, open year around, includes T-shirts, sweatshirts, books, jewelry, posters, insect-collecting equipment and insect-themed candy.

The Bohart Museum holds special open houses throughout the academic year. Its regular hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. The museum is closed to the public on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and on major holidays. Admission is free.

More information on the Bohart Museum is available by contacting (530) 752-0493 or emailing bmuseum@ucdavis.edu or Tabatha Yang at tabyang@ucdavis.edu.

If you're looking for a worthy cause to support during the giving season (and as a bonus, receive a tax deduction), think tardigrades, aka water bears.

Or more specifically, think "sculpture in front of the Bohart Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Davis."

The Bohart Museum, which owns one of the world's largest tardigrade collections, plans to install a tardigrade sculpture to grace its entrance, says director Lynn Kimsey, professor of entomology at UC Davis.

The Bohart Museum Society has set up a GoFundMe account: see https://www.gofundme.com/f/waterbear-sculpture.

"The reason for this is that we have one of the world's largest tardigrade collections, which was compiled by (senior museum scientist) Steve Heydon's predecessor, Bob Schuster," Kimsey explained.  "This collection is the result of years of collecting, mounting, imaging, and identifying by former collection manager Bob Schuster and emeritus professor Al Grigarick and their collaborators."

The Bohart collection includes some 25,000 slide-mounted specimens. Kimsey and collaborator Carl Johannsen work on a National Science Foundation grant to database and conserve the collection.

Kimsey says this about tardigrades:

• They belong to their own phyllum, the Tardigrada (meaning "slow steppers"), and to date there are some 1,500 described species throughout the world."
• They belong to one most peculiar and indestructible groups of animals known. Microscopic and nearly indestructible, they can survive being heated to 304 degrees Fahrenheit or being chilled for days at -328 F. And, even if they're frozen for 30 years, they can still reproduce." See video on EurekAlert.
• Tardigrades can survive high pressures of more than 1,200 atmospheres found in the bottom of the abyss.  They can tolerate 1,000 times more ionizing radiation than other animals.
• In research published in 2016, geneticist Takekazu Kunieda and his colleagues from the University of Tokyo found that the water bear expresses a tardigrade-specific protein that binds itself to DNA. This acts like a "shield against x-ray radiation, preventing the DNA from snapping apart," according to an article published in Gizmodo. 
• German zoologist Johann August Ephraim Goeze (1731-1793) first described the critters in 1773, referring to them as "kleiner Wasserbär," or "little water bears."
• They're easiest to find on lichens and mosses but they can also be found on beaches, in the subtidal zone, freshwater sediments, soil, hot springs and even on barnacles. They've been found high in the Himalayas to down in the deep sea. They've even been found in the interior of Antarctica.
• They mostly feed on plants or bacteria but some are predators on smaller tardigrades. They use the stylets in their tubular mouth (snout) to pierce individual plant or bacterial ells or small invertebrates.
• The stubby water bear sports a barrel-shaped body and eight pudgy legs. The  adults usually range from 0.3 to 0.5 mm in length.
• They are really popular with kids in part because of their representation in the movies Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp, Star Trek and Family Guy.

Kimsey has been in touch with sculptor Solomon Bassoff (Faducciart) in Roseville. "He did the caterpillar in the Davis Central Park."

The donations are coming in.

• Alumnus and donor Stephen Clement commented: "I donated because of the mentoring I received from Al Grigarick (major professor for Ph.D) and from Bob Schuster for his taxonomic help (M.S. degree), 1970-1976."
• Donor Pablo Bleyer declared: "Tardigrades were some of my childhood friends."
• Donor Bob Goldstein: "Davis seems like a great place for a tardigrade sculpture! I'm inspired by the tardigradologists and nematologists I've admired there. A eutardigrade seems like it'd be less prone to causing injuries, but I can support a heterotardigrade :)"

 "Tardigrades are awesome," Kimsey said, marveling that "They can dry out completely and then become immortal. In fact, SpaceIL may have left thousands of dried tardigrades on the moon when it crashed earlier this year."

Meanwhile, stuffed toy water bears, the scientific version of a teddy bear, are quite popular in the Bohart Museum's gift shop, which also includes insect-themed books, posters, t-shirts, jewelry, candy, and insect collecting equipment.

The museum, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane, houses nearly 8 million insect specimens, collected globally. It also maintains a live "petting zoo" featuring Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and tarantulas. 

And on the horizon: a one-of-a-kind, talk-of-the-campus tardigrade sculpture.

Fact: Eighty percent of the world's population eat insects.

Fact: At least 80 percent of those attending the Bohart Museum of Entomology's open house on entomophagy ate one or more insects--a cricket, an earthworm or a mealworm. The diners ranged in age from a 9-month-old girl to senior citizens.

Some came back for more--especially the mealworms and earthworms, said Bohart associate Emma Cluff. The crickets? Not so much.

A two-year-old from Dixon happily munched everything given to him. "He'll eat anything," his mother said.

Various companies, including Hotlix, Exo and Chirps Chips, provided the samples.

Besides eating insects, visitors asked questions about entomophagy and handled insects from the petting zoo, which includes Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks or stick insects, and tarantulas.

They also made buttons proclaiming "I Ate a Bug at the Bohart."

A display, titled "Bug Buffet," drew widespread interest: "Have you ever eaten ant pancakes or scorpion scaloppini? Well, eating bugs (entomophagy) is a lot more common than you might think. All round the world, people eat delicious and nutritious insect delicacies."

The dishes mentioned on the display:

• Locust Biscuits, featuring the brown locust, Locustana pardalina
• Mexican Caviar, starring the giant water bug, Abedus herberti
• Termite a la Carte, featuring termites, order Isoptera 
• Maguey Worm Tacos, with Maguey worms, family Megathymidae
• Raw Cossid Moths, starring the larvae of the cossid moth, Xyleutes leucomochia
  
• Fried Pupae, presenting the pupae of the silkworm moth, Bombix mori

The raw cossid moths? Quite nutritious. The information read: "They are eaten raw by Australian aborigines and supposedly taste like almonds...and they "provide all the calories, protein and fat an adult human needs for one day."

The next Bohart Museum open house, themed Parasitoid Palooza!, is on Saturday, Oct. 19 from 1 to 4 p.m. It is free and family friendly. The museum is located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Drive.

"An insect parasitoid is a species whose immatures live off of an insect host, often eating it from the inside out," said Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator of the Bohart Museum. "It is part of their life cycle and the host generally dies."

The late UC Davis entomologist Richard M. Bohart (1913-2007), founder of the Bohart Museum, researched Strepsiptera, or twisted-wing parasites, for his doctorate in 1938. Both the Bohart Museum and an entire family of Strepsiptera, the Bohartillidae, are named in his honor.

The Bohart Museum, directed by Lynn Kimsey, UC Davis professor of entomology, houses a global collection of nearly eight million specimens. It is home to the seventh largest insect collection in North America, and the California Insect Survey, a storehouse of the insect biodiversity. It also maintains a year-around gift shop, which is stocked with T-shirts, sweatshirts, books, jewelry, posters, insect-collecting equipment and insect-themed candy.

The insect museum is open to the public Mondays through Thursdays from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m., except on holidays. More information on the Bohart Museum is available on the website at http://bohart.ucdavis.edu or by contacting (530) 752-0493 or bmuseum@ucdavis.edu. (See list of open houses for the 2019-2020 academic year.)

It didn't appear that anything was wrong.

He hid it well.

"It's okay," he said quietly. "I'm okay."

But what happened to him wasn't okay then, and it isn't okay now.

On Saturday afternoon, Sept. 21, we greeted Syed Fahad Shah, a visiting scholar at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, as he cut circles lettered with "I ate a bug at the Bohart Museum." He and doctoral student Charlotte Herbert Alberts were helping visitors make buttons during the Bohart Museum open house on entomophagy.

When the open house ended, Bohart Museum education and outreach coordinator Tabatha Yang asked me: "Did you hear  what happened to Shah last night?" I had not.

"He got robbed at gunpoint when he was walking home last night on Russell Boulevard," she said.

It happened the previous night (Friday night, Sept. 20). A robber, aided by an accomplice, stole the entomologist's wallet containing his rent money and credit cards, his newly purchased laptop, and an external hard drive containing scientific data.

Shah, a lecturer in the Department of Entomology, University of Agriculture, Peshawar, Pakistan, was heading home to his apartment after a long day working in the lab. He was without a bike Friday (it had a flat tire).

As he walked along Russell Boulevard, near Lake Boulevard, west of Highway 113,  he noticed a car, its emergency lights flashing, parked on the other side of the road (north).

“I was looking at the car and thought that maybe they have some kind of problem with the car,” Shaw related.  As he continued walking home, a man leaped from behind a tree trunk, pointed his gun at him and cocked it “to let me know it was real."

The suspect, described as about six-feet tall, between 20 and 30 years old, with curly hair and a dark bandanna covering his face, demanded, one by one, his wallet, his cell phone and then his backpack. The culprit then heaved Shah's cell phone into the field, and bolted to the car where his accomplice, the driver, awaited. The car headed west.

Shah described the car as a sedan, “like a Corolla,” and “dark in in color with rectangular back lights.” He retrieved his phone and quickly dialed the police. “The police arrived within five minutes and recorded my statement,” he said.  

His black Armour Hustle backpack contained a laptop computer delivered to him only Monday, Sept. 9 at the Bohart Museum. His most valuable possession, however, was an external hard drive containing all his research data and lectures. It is a Seagate 1 terabyte hard drive.

Shah had not yet backed up the contents on the hard drive. Ironically, while enroute to the United States for his May 15-Oct. 30 research sabbatical on agriculturally important insects, someone stole his laptop at the Dubai airport. “But I was happy that I had the data backed up on my external hard drive, but this time I have no backup,” he said. “I only wish for my hard drive back.”

At UC Davis, Shah is studying parasitoid wasps in the family Pteromalidae under the guidance of Bohart senior museum scientist Steve Heydon.

In an announcement to the Department of Entomology and Nematology, Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology, reported that Shah “filed a police report but that probably won't help get his equipment back. The data is irreplaceable but we hope to help him replace the things stolen, so we have started a GoFundMe page to raise the needed fund."

The GoFundMe account, seeking $2000, is at https://bit.ly/2ldZ3ZF. For more information, contact the Bohart Museum at (530) 752-0493 or Lynn Kimsey at lskimsey@ucdavis.edu or Tabatha Yang at tabyang@ucdavis.edu.

Here's hoping that we can help Shaw recoup his losses, and maybe, just maybe, a miracle will occur and someone will find and return his external hard drive. "I only wish for my hard drive back."