- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
No?
Well, a newly described bacteria species now carries the last name of a husband-wife team: Lynn and Robert "Bob" Kimsey of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
Bob, a forensic entomologist, and Lynn, a hymenopterist and director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology, recently welcomed a joint namesake: Chryseobacterium kimseyorum.
It's a species found more than a decade ago inside the gut of a stick insect housed in the Bohart Museum of Entomology petting zoo.
“We've had a few things named after us but never bacteria--that's a first,” Lynn related.
Our story begins more than a decade ago when then UC Davis doctoral student Matan Shelomi, now an associate professor of entomology at National Taiwan University, Taiwan, was studying the digestive physiology of the stick and leaf insects, Phasmatodea, for his Ph.D, pursued under the guidance of his major professor, Lynn Kimsey. He isolated and cultured bacteria from the guts and cages of the stick insects. Some of the species seemed new to science, but Shelomi had neither the time nor the resources to prove it then.
He stored the microbes inside the deep freezers of the Phaff Yeast Culture Collection, UC Davis Department of Food Science and Technology.
"Thankfully, I kept all my notes from graduate school," said Shelomi, "so I was able to check and see which strains I had flagged as possibly new species. When I saw one of them was the same genus as the new microbe found in Taiwan, I realized this was an opportunity to describe them both together." So Shelomi emailed Kyria Boundy-Mills, curator of the Phaff Collection, “who had my old specimen revived and shipped across the Pacific.”
Analysis confirmed two new species. The result: A research article published April 19 in the International Journal of Systemic and Evolutionary Microbiology. The title:“Chryseobacterium oryctis sp. nov., Isolated from the Gut of the Beetle Oryctes rhinoceros, and Chryseobacterium kimseyorum sp. nov., Isolated from a Stick Insect Rearing Cage.”
Han named his species after the beetle he found it in. Shelomi named his species (which he found in Eurycantha calcarata, commonly known as the "Giant New Guinea Stick Insect” or “Thorny Devil Stick”) after his former bosses. The suffix -orum in kimseyorum indicates that the name honors both Kimseys. “Officially one cannot name a microbe after more than one person, but there is precedent, so the (journal) editors allowed it. My grad student wanted to name her microbe after her dog, BaBa, but the editors did not allow that. Spoil-sports!”
Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator of the Bohart Museum, relayed the news to a tour group visiting the insect museum on April 20. “I just used this story today with a tour group,” she told Shelomi. “I mentioned how your student was denied her dog's name. I love how this ties the Bohart and the Phaff Yeast collection together and then California and Taiwan.”
As for the stick insect, “It's pretty aggressive for a walking stick,” Lynn Kimsey said, noting that Andy Engilis, curator of the UC Davis Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, told her about his work in Papua New Guinea. “These walking sticks would actually chase rodents out of their burrows and take over the burrows to rest in,” she related. “That's pretty tough for a walking stick.”
Meanwhile, the Kimseys are enjoying their new namesake. LynnKimsey already has seven other species named for her:
- Mystacagenia kimseyae Cambra & Wasbauer 2020 (spider wasp)
- Oligoaster kimseyae Soliman 2013 (tiphiid wasp)
- Exaerate kimseyae Oliviera 2011 (orchid bee)
- Spilomena kimseyae Antropov 1993 (solitary wasp)
- Manaos kimseyae Smith (argid sawfly)
- Spintharina kimseyae Bohart 1987 (cuckoo wasp)
- Neodryinus kimseyae Olmi 1987 (dryinid wasp)
Bob Kimsey has as at least two species named for him: Acordulacera kimseyi Smith, 2010 (sawfly) and Grandiella kimseyi Summers & Schuster (mite).
Shelomi, a Harvard University graduate who received his doctorate from UC Davis in 2014, served as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Germany for two years before accepting a faculty position in 2017 at National Taiwan University.
Shelomi returned to UC Davis in 2017 to present a seminar on "Revelations from Phasmatodea Digestive Track Transcriptomics,” to the department.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
What are "predatory journals?" Entomologist Matan Shelomi defines them as those that "appear legitimate, but practice no peer review, no editing, not even a reality check."
Predatory journals are especially dangerous during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Shelomi, a Harvard graduate and UC Davis-trained entomologist who is now an assistant professor of entomology at the National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
He's right. And what he recently did showed why peer-reviewed articles are crucial in the realm of scientific literature.
Here's what occurred.
Being an avid Pokémon scholar and fan--and a foe of fake news--Shelomi wrote a fictitious research paper about how eating a bat-like Pokémon sparked the spread of COVID-19. A journal editor accepted it for publication (without peer-review) and it appeared online in open access.
For a time.
As Shelomi recounted in his Nov. 1 opinion piece, "Using Pokémon to Detect Scientific Misinformation," in The Scientist: “On March 18, 2020, the American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research published my paper claiming that eating a bat-like Pokémon sparked the spread of COVID-19. This paper, 'Cyllage City COVID-19 outbreak linked to Zubat consumption,' blames a fictional creature for an outbreak in a fictional city, cites fictional references (including one from author Bruce Wayne in Gotham Forensics Quarterly on using bats to fight crime), and is cowritten by fictional authors such as Pokémon's Nurse Joy and House, MD. Nonetheless, four days after submission, editor Catherine Nichols was ‘cheerful to inform' me via email that it had “received positive review comments” and was accepted for publication.”
The fake research article no longer appears online; staff removed it for nonpayment of fees.
Shelomi offers this advice: "How, then, to catch a predator, besides checking Beall's List? First, assume all journals or conferences that email you unsolicited submission invitations are predatory, especially if they are outside your field, cover overly broad subjects, promise rapid review, or flatter you with compliments such as 'eminent researcher.' Any journal with multiple email domains is predatory, as are absolutely all journals that list the worthless “Index Copernicus” number on their website."
"There are no shortcuts in science," he pointed out in The Scientist. "If you want to be taken seriously as an academic, do not give predatory journals your business, especially as institutes wise up to the problem and stop accepting such articles on CVs or applications. Although, if any institute wants to grant me an honorary degree in Pokémon Studies for my eminence in the field, I would cheerfully accept."
Reactions
Did Shelomi get much reaction from his Pokémon project?
"I haven't had much reaction, honestly, though what little I had has all been very favorable," he told us. "I'm disappointed this doesn't get much traction among the Pokémon community, at least. I wrote the tell-all for The Scientist as a way to get more attention to the original articles. The predatory journals, of course, do not know or care about any negative press."
"I recently saw that an actual, legitimate, peer-reviewed journal had accepted (and eventually retracted) a paper saying COVID-19 is caused by earth's magnetic field, and that jade amulets can prevent it. Why do I bother sending fake papers to fraudulent journals when real journals are publishing such nonsense? And we should never forget that the modern anti-vaxxer movement started from a paper in The Lancet, then the top medical journal on earth.
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/paper-proposing-covid-19-magnetism-link-to-be-retracted-68126
"I suspect most scientists are unaware of what predatory journals are, especially in the developing world where quantity matters over quality regarding publish or perish. While research ethics courses were required when I was at UC Davis, I suspect most researchers worldwide go from undergrad to tenure without ever learning about the difference
between garbage journal and fake ones. If my Pokémon papers can be used to educate, then they are doing their jobs."
Shelomi says that "the cruel irony is that pseudoscience and conspiracy theory blogs are using my papers as an example of why science is not to be trusted, despite the fact that in it I explicitly call out anti-vaxxers and other anti-science people. This is the world we live in: good science gets ignored, garbage science gets published, and nonsense gets
promoted on the blogosphere by those saying "don't trust scientists."
"I will be the first to say that not everything written in IMRaD format (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion) is trustworthy, but it's still going to be far more reliable than a 140-character tweet. People, including scientists, need to learn how to identify good sources and how to identify garbage, and 2020 being what it is I am not optimistic that we can teach them. I will certainly do my part in trying!"
Shelomi received his doctorate in entomology from UC Davis in 2014, studying with major professor Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology, and professor and former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. He then received a National Science Foundation-funded postdoctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. He is recognized as a top writer on Quora and is active on Twitter.
While at UC Davis, Shelomi co-authored "A Phylogeny and Evolutionary History of the Pokémon," a paper published in the Annals of Improbable Research (August 2012), a tongue-in-cheek journal meant to make people laugh and then think. (See feature story). Basically, it was "a very real phylogeny of the very fake Pokémon creatures," as he described it. "This paper represents the first attempt to create a quantitative phylogeny of the Pokémon, using the underlying assumption that Pokémon evolved via natural selection independently from the animals and plants more familiar to Western zoologists. The goal was to apply modern evolutionary theory and techniques to a field previously limited to pre-Darwinian methods of inquiry."
And, as Matan Shelomi acknowledged in The Scientist, he writes "fake articles under the pseudonym Mattan Schlomi."
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The larvae and pupae of the Asian giant hornet taste like French fries.
So says UC Davis-trained entomologist Matan Shelomi, assistant professor of entomology at the National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan, whose course on “Edible Insects” is the largest in his department.
Shelomi, a graduate of Harvard University, holds a doctorate in entomology from UC Davis, where he studied with major professor Lynn Kimsey, who directs the Bohart Museum of Entomology and serves as a professor of entomology in the Department of Entomology and Nematology.
Shelomi recently posted an intriguing comment on the Facebook page, Is This a Murder Hornet?
“More like delicious hornet," he wrote.
Asian giant hornets, sensationally nicknamed “murder hornets” by non-entomologists, continue to grab front-page headlines. The first colony detected (and eradicated) in North America occurred last September on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Then a single a dead one was found in Blaine, Wash., in December.
The world's largest hornets (they can measure approximately 2 inches in length), they attack and kill honey bees and feed the remains to their young. They can decimate a hive. Thus, beekeepers worry that AGH will invade North America, become established, and cripple the apiculture industry. The Washington State Department of Agriculture and Washington State University Extension are asking residents to keep a lookout for them and report any sightings. (See WSU Extension Fact Sheet.)
The newly acquired nickname, "murder hornet," triggers fear. But amid the panic, terror and near hysteria, it's important to point out that there is NO national invasion and they are NOT coming for us.
This insect was previously known as the Asian giant hornet or AGH before the BBC, the New York Times and other media labeled it "the murder hornet.”
UC Davis distinguished professor Walter Leal, who studied and worked in Japan, and speaks Japanese, says someone's mistranslation of Japanese research led to “yellow” translated as “killer.” Leal told us: "The Asian giant hornet, Vespa mandarinia, is called “Kiiro Suzume Bachi (キイロスズメバチ)” in Japanese. It injects its venoms, sometimes inducing severe anaphylaxis. The translation is incorrect. Kiiro means yellow, but it was translated as “killer.”
Indeed, the BBC report on May 4 managed to insert "coronavirus," "murder hornets" and "terror" in the same sentence. The lede: “Even as the US remains under attack from the coronavirus outbreak, a new terror has arrived: 'murder hornets.'"
Not "murder" hornets to Matan Shelomi: "Delicious hornets."
On the newly created Facebook page dispelling the myths and misinformation about the giant hornet, Shelomi posted photos of Vespa mandarinia larvae and pupae dishes, "raw and fried, from a small restaurant in Hualien in eastern Taiwan. You can also find it in the Huaxi night market in Taipei, if it's in season.”
“Several bee and wasp species have edible brood, which can be fried, steamed, roasted, cooked with soy and sugar, or eaten raw,” Shelomi wrote. “Even honey bee brood is edible! While it's not exactly commonplace, Asian giant hornet has been or is still consumed in parts of China, Japan, Taiwan, and northeastern India." (Source: "Edible Insects of the World" by Jun Mitsuhashi)
“To get the brood, you must harvest the nest. ‘Isn't that dangerous,' you ask? Yes, in the same way extracting honey is dangerous. Stay safe by collecting at night when they are resting, using smoke to pacify them, and wearing protective clothing. To find the nests of edible wasps, Japanese harvesters tie a cotton ball to a piece of fish meat and present it to a female wasp. She will carry it home, and you can follow her to find the nest! That's a bit harder with the giant hornet, as they can travel 2km on their foraging runs. They are not exactly rare in East Asia [for now], so those in the know can find nests easily. A helpful trick is to harvest the adults first. At night, knock down the nest, put a big bowl of rice wine in front of the entrance, and shine a bright light. The wasps get stunned by the light and fall into the wine. You can then harvest the adults and steep them in wine to make a medicinal alcohol, and take the brood as a snack. Who's murdering who now!"
“In case you were wondering, fried murder hornet tastes like French fries: if you can eat a potato, you can eat a pupa. That said, if you are allergic to shellfish, you may also be allergic to insects and should not consume them."
“Oh, and insects cannot get any coronaviruses, so don't worry about that either. Save a pangolin; eat a wasp."
Shelomi's post prompted Facebook member Geevee Snow of Brooklyn, N.Y., to comment: “My stomach just growled.”
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
- You don't know until you try.
- You miss every opportunity you do not take.
- Each answer to a question creates new questions.
So began UC Davis alumnus Matan Shelomi when he returned to the UC Davis campus Wednesday, Nov. 15 to present a seminar on his stick insect research: "Revelations from Phasmatodea Digestive Track Transcriptomics."
Matan Shelomi, a Harvard graduate from New York City, earned his doctorate in entomology in 2014 from UC Davis, studying with major professor Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology. He then received a National Science Foundation-funded postdoctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. Today he's an assistant professor of entomology in the Department of Entomology at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan.
Shelomi focused his seminar on the digestive physiology of the stick and leaf insects, Phasmatodea, research that has taken him to three continents.
Kimsey introduced him as a terrific scientist and writer. Shelomi, with his quick wit and wry sense of humor, captivated his audience immediately.
One of his introductory slides read: The Unknown Unknowns
"...there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns--the ones we don't know we don't know."--Donald Rumsfeld.
You may know Matan Shelomi for his informative and entertaining posts on Quora. A top writer at Quora since 2013, he is followed by nearly 4000 subscribers and has answered more than 3000 questions. Or you may know him for his many accomplishments and honors/awards at UC Davis or at the Entomological Society of America meetings. Or his work at the Bohart Museum where he answered scores of questions about insects, greeting scientists, insect enthusiasts, and the general public alike. He was a regular at their regularly scheduled weekend open houses.
But back to his seminar: He defined a transcriptome as "sequencing of RNA expressed in given tissue at specific time and condition" and explained "RNA-sequence make cDNA from mRNA sequence."
He talked about stick insects producing cellulase and pectinase and about the research he's published, and new research that he hasn't. Yet. It's pending.
Each answer to a question led to more questions.
"Who knew?" he asked.
Shelomi closed his presentation with three points:
- "Transcriptomes reveal unknown unknowns."
- "There's still more left to discover."
- "Science is fun."
Shelomi said there's still many, many more questions to be answered on stick insects. "I'll leave that to others," he said, adding that he's now turned to studying the microbiome of dengue-vectoring mosquito breeding sites.
The take-away message?
"That in biology one cannot assume," Shelomi said. "Some things we thought were universal only seemed that way because we hadn't checked for alternatives, and then stopped looking. But biology is not math: there are few if any axioms. Every species is unique, and every rule has an exception. Sometimes the former rules are the exception, like animal cellulases: once thought nonexistant, we now see that they are the ancestral state, and species lacking them are the exception. Organs, proteins, species may have radically different functions from their most similar relative. There is obviously still a place for educated guesses, but until you check you never know for sure... and the search may reveal things you never even thought to look for."
The applause that followed his talk was loud and long.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Next week UC Davis alumnus Matan Shelomi will introduce you to his "sticks": the stick and leaf insects from the order Phasmatodea that he studies.
He'll present a seminar from 4:10 to 5 p.m., on Wednesday, Nov. 15 in 122 Briggs Hall, University of California, Davis, on "Revelations from Phasmatodea Digestive Track Transcriptomics." Hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, the seminar is open to all interested persons.
Shelomi, who holds a doctorate in entomology from UC Davis (Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology at UC Davis served as his major professor) recently accepted a position as assistant professor of entomology in the Department of Entomology at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan.
Originally from New York City, the Harvard graduate (bachelor's degree in organismic and evolutionary biology) obtained his doctorate in entomology in 2014. He then received a National Science Foundation-funded postdoctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. His past research has focused on the digestive physiology of the stick and leaf insects, Phasmatodea, although he is currently studying the microbiome of dengue-vectoring mosquito breeding sites.
You may know Matan Shelomi for his informative and entertaining posts on Quora. A top writer at Quora since 2013, he is followed by nearly 4000 subscribers and has answered more than 3000 questions. Or you may know him for his many accomplishments and honors/awards at UC Davis or at the Entomological Society of America meetings. Or his work at the Bohart Museum where he answered scores of questions about insects, greeting scientists, insect enthusiasts, and the general public alike. He was a regular at their regularly scheduled weekend open houses.
"The stick and leaf insects (order Phasmatodea) are an unusual, herbivorous order more closely related to webspinners and cockroaches than to grasshoppers and crickets," Shelomi says in his abstract. "Neither serious pests nor disease vectors, their biology has been poorly studied, yet recent work has revealed just how little we knew about their inner workings. Exclusive leaf-feeders, it was not known how they are able to thrive on such a diet and reach their record-setting lengths."
He will present the results of his research on Phasmatodean anatomy and evolution, spanning seven years and three continents.
Shelomi points out: "Using transcriptomics—the study of what genes are expressed in a given tissue at a different time—one can discover what enzymes are produced by the digestive tissues, what compounds are eliminated by the excretory tissues, and even guess the functions of mysterious tissues such as the 'appendices of the midgut,' a Phasmatodea-specific organ system whose physiological role was unknown for over a century. The diversity of Phasmatodean digestive enzymes includes some surprising members whose evolution in Insecta is changing what we thought we knew. As mysteries are solved and old hypotheses revised, Phasmatodea exemplify the scientists' search for the unknown and the hidden secrets the natural world waits to reveal."
Matan says he plans to present an informal seminar, one that he hopes will be both entertaining and informative.
Stick insects are a key part of the Bohart Museum's live "petting zoo," which is opento the public Monday through Thursday. In fact, back in 2012, two entomologists/Bohart associates designed a humorous t-shirt inscribed with “Know Your Sticks," featuring drawings of four sticks: a stick person, a real stick or twig, a Vietnamese walking stick and an Australian spiny stick (family Phasmatidae). It's available for sale in the Bohart Museum's gift shop.
Bohart associate Fran Keller, who received her doctorate in entomology at UC Davis and is now as assistant professor at Folsom Lake College, originated the idea of a stick t-shirt--in between studying for her doctoral degree in entomology and serving as a Bohart associate/volunteer. It was those stick figures trending on vehicle rear-windows that influenced and inspired her. “So we thought we'd clarify the sticks."
Keller designed the shirt. Ivana Li, then an undergraduate student and president of the UC Davis Entomology Club and now a staff research associate in the Department of Evolution and Ecology, drew the illustrations.
Don't be surprised if Matan Shelomi's former colleagues at the Bohart Museum show up in their "Know Your Sticks" t-shirts.