- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Just ask UC Davis entomology student Sol Wantz, who will present a talk on katydids (her favorite insect), grasshoppers and crickets at the Bohart Museum of Entomology open house, set from 1 to 4 p.m., Sunday, March 3 in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus. It's free and family friendly.
We remember a crab spider that also found a katydid "incredibly fascinating." Umm, make that "nutritious." The spider grabbed the katydid on a Mexican sunflower (Tithonia rotundifola) in our garden, paralyzed it with a venomous bite, and then dragged it beneath the petals to eat it.
It's all about the cycle of life. Everything eats in the garden.
Sol Wantz triples as a curator intern at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, a student researcher in the lab of pollination ecologist and professor Neal Williams, and as president of the UC Davis Entomology Club.
“I'll be giving a overview of all of the major and most interesting--in my opinion--families of Orthoptera," she said. The order includes some 20,000 species worldwide.
Did you know that "the katydid genus Supersonus produces the highest frequency sound of any known animal, up to 150 kHz!" she asks. "For reference, humans can hear only between 0 and 20 kHz."
The Bohart Museum, directed by Professor Jason Bond, is located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane. It houses a global collection of eight million insect specimens, plus a live petting zoo (Madagasgar hissing cockroaches, stick insects, tarantulas and more) and an insect-themed gift shop stocked with T-shirts, hooded sweatshirts, books, posters, jewelry and insect-collecting equipment.
For more information, access the Bohart website at https://bohart.ucdavis.edu or contact bmuseum@ucdavis.edu.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Themed "Grasshoppers, Crickets and Katydids," the open house will take place from 1 to 4 p.m., Sunday, March 3 in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus. It's free and family friendly. Parking is also free.
UC Davis third-year entomology major Solea “Sol” Wantz, who triples as a curator intern at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, a student researcher in the lab of pollination ecologist and professor Neal Williams, and as president of the UC Davis Entomology Club, will discuss “Grasshoppers, Crickets and Katydids."
She'll deliver her presentation at 1 p.m., and questions and answers will follow. The venue: a classroom of the Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, located next to the Bohart Museum.
“I'll be giving a overview of all of the major and most interesting--in my opinion--families of Orthoptera," she said. The order includes some 20,000 species worldwide.
A few factoids she related:
- The katydid genus Supersonus produces the highest frequency sound of any known animal, up to 150 kHz! For reference, humans can only hear between 0 and 20 kHz.
- The family Myrmecophilidae, the “ant-loving crickets” are tiny, wingless crickets that live only in ant nests. “We even have these here in Davis, but they're hard to find unless you're digging through ant colonies,” Wantz says.
- Jerusalem crickets, also known as "potato bugs," have a unique method of sound production. "Rather than using their wings (they are actually wingless, she says) or another sound-producing organ, these crickets thump their abdomen against the ground to produce a surprisingly loud noise. Their thumping patterns can be used to identify their species."
“It's actually a grasshopper defense mechanism!” Wantz says. “When under stress--usually when they are grabbed, especially around the thorax-- grasshoppers vomit a foul-smelling/tasting liquid to ward off whatever predator is attacking them.”
Orthoptera (in ancient Greece, “ortho” means "straight,” and “optera” means "wings") is an order that includes grasshoppers, crickets, locusts and katydids. Grasshopper belong to the suborder Caelifera, and crickets and katydids to Ensifera.
Wantz, who decided at age 6 that she wanted to become an entomologist, is currently re-curating and reorganizing the Bohart's collection of several thousand specimens of Orthoptera.
"After finishing my undergraduate degree at UC Davis, I aim to enter a graduate program, potentially to explore my newfound interest in systematics. Ultimately, I hope to become a professor of entomology and lead my own research lab. This appeals to me because it presents the opportunity to weave together my knowledge of wild bee ecology and conservation, love of Orthoptera and museum work, and emphasis on professional outreach and public engagement."
The Bohart Museum, directed by Professor Jason Bond, houses a global collection of eight million insect specimens, plus a live petting zoo (Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects, tarantulas and more) and an insect-themed gift shop stocked with T-shirts, hooded sweatshirts, books, posters, jewelry and insect-collecting equipment.
For more information, access the Bohart website at https://bohart.ucdavis.edu or contact bmuseum@ucdavis.edu.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
That's what postdoctoral scholar Bodil Cass of the Jay Rosenheim lab, University of California, Davis, will discuss at her seminar from 4:10 to 5 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 25 in 122 Briggs Hall, UC Davis campus. Admission is free, and the seminar is open to all interested persons.
"Citrus is a major agricultural industry in California with a established integrated pest management (IPM) program," she says. "However, the IPM guidelines for citrus are based on years of experience and careful field research in navel oranges, and have not been updated to accommodate the recent dramatic increase in mandarin acreage in the San Joaquin Valley. We know oranges and mandarins are very different plants, but not which practices need to be modified to effectively control pests in mandarins."
Cass says that updating the IPM guidelines for "a new citrus species is a substantial challenge, given the scale and pace of citrus production. We are using a combination of ecoinformatics--data mining of pest management records provided by cooperating citrus growers--and field experiments to expand our understanding of the arthropod pest complex in California citrus. Analyses of the historical commercial data indicate that fork-tailed bush katydids, Scudderia furcata, which are a key pest in oranges, very rarely damage some species of mandarin. We are using field experiments to test hypotheses to explain this intriguing observation, and to determine whether katydids are indeed a pest at all in mandarins."
A native of the state of Queensland, Australia, Cass is an accomplished scholar who holds several degrees:
- A bachelor's degree (2005) from the University of Queensland, where she graduated with high distinction and a dean's commendation for high achievement. (She completed the Advanced Studies Program in Science in 2005, and the Enhanced Studies Program in Chemistry, 2012)
- Honors Integrative Biology (2006), University of Queensland, with high distinction and valedictorian
- Doctorate in Interdisciplinary Program in Entomology and Insect and minor in ecology and evolutionary biology (2015) from the University of Arizona (4.0 GPA)
Cass joined the lab of Jay Rosenheim, UC Davis professor of entomology, in 2016, and also serves as an associate in the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. She has published her work in Oecologia, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, Microbial Ecology, Research in Microbiology, Science, and PLoS Genetics, PLoS Biology and PLoS Pathogens, among other journals.
A member of the Entomological Society of America (ESA), Cass delivered oral presentations at the ESA annual conferences in 2011 and 2015, and also at the 2016 International Congress of Entomology (ICE), co-chaired by UC Davis chemical ecologist Walter Leal and held last September in Orlando, Fla. She is the co-principal investigator of a 2017 grant awarded by the Citrus Research Board.
Cass has also won a number of fellowships and awards, including national awards in the P.E.O. International Peace Scholarship Program in both 2008 and 2009.
It's not at all surprising that one of the many awards she won in the beginning of her career was the "Smart Women, Smart State Award" in the undergraduate category, statewide competition (Queensland) in 2005.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
This is an insect that looks as if it were assembled by a dysfunctional committee: long angular legs, long antennae, and beady eyes on a thin green body.
All hail the katydid.
It's usually camouflaged, disguised as a leaf in the vegetation--Nature's gift.
But in our pollinator garden, we see them. Two of them. One is tucked beneath red rose petals, and another is nestled inside a white cosmos.
Katydids feed on leaves, flowers, fruit and plant seeds, and often will take just a bite of fruit, such as apricot, pear, peach, plum, blueberry and citrus, but enough to cause considerable damage. If they're agricultural pests, check out the UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program (UC IPM) website and learn how to manage them.
These katydids proved to be photogenic.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Katydids did it.
When it comes to the best of the industrial-strength shredding machines, they're it.
The nymphs have been feeding our Iceland poppies, chewing incredible holes in petal after petal, and then looking around for more. They leave behind what looks like shredded cabbage.
But if you catch them early in the morning with the sun lighting them up, they're kind of beautiful with their thin, angular legs; antennae longer than their bodies; and beady looking eyes fixated at you. The nymphs can't fly, so when disturbed, they merely hop away, camouflaged in the vegetation.
"Katydids occasionally become damaging pests in orchards where broad-spectrum pesticides were not applied or are under minimum tillage programs," according to the UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program's Pest Note on Katydids. "High numbers of these pests may occur near raisin and wine grape vineyards, where the do no damage to the fruit."
"Nymphs feed on leaves or fruit early in the spring as they climb from the ground to the tree. Katydid nymphs tend to take one bite out of a fruit before moving on to another feeding site. Hence, a few katydids may damage a large number of fruit in a short time. Feeding wounds heal over and enlarge into corky patches as the fruit expands. The most serious damage occurs when katydids feed on young fruit, which become severely distorted as they develop. Nymphs and adults also chew holes in foliage. Smaller nymphs feed in the middle of the leaf, creating small holes, whereas larger nymphs and adults feed on the leaf edge."
See more information by Googling "katydids UC IPM." You'll find information on UC IPM guidelines for katydids on citrus, nectarine, pomegranate, pear, apricot, plum and other crops.
Meanwhile, those katydid nymphs continue to frequent our Iceland poppies. Other dinner guests--uninvited--are showing up, too. Let's make a hole in one! (Or two, or three!) Let's eat! Let's shred!