- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
In stunning images, the Bohart Museum display depicts the complete metamorphosis of the monarch: from egg to larva to pupa to adult.
It's the work of Larry Snyder of Davis, who for several years photographed a UC Davis professor's research project on wild monarch-native milkweed interactions in the North Davis Channel of rural Davis. Snyder is a retired music teacher, vocal accompanist, and piano and harpsichord technician.
We wrote about the monarch-milkweed project on the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology website on July 28, 2022.
Professor Louie Yang, the principal investigator of the research project, organized and led a 135-member team, all co-authors of the paper, “Different Factors Limit Early- and Late-Season Windows of Opportunity for Monarch Development,” published in the journal Ecology and Evolution. (This document is open access at https://bit.ly/3volFaI.)
From 2015 through 2017, the team monitored the interactions of monarchs, Danaus plexippus, on narrow-leafed milkweed, Asclepias fascicularis, planted in December 2013 on city-owned property adjacent to the North Davis irrigation channel.
The project, funded by two of Yang's National Science Foundation grants, involved UC Davis, Davis Senior High School and the Center for Land-Based learning. Among them were 107 high school students and a K-12 teacher, 18 UC Davis undergraduate students, three graduate students and two post-graduate researchers.
Unfortunately, a City of Davis maintenance crew unintentionally mowed the site on May 5, 2017, “damaging several plants in this population," Yang related. "However, most plants in the population were below the height of the mower blades at this point in the growing season.”
Today the milkweed population at the North Davis Channel is being maintained by the City of Davis and dedicated citizens, including Larry Snyder.
From music to milkweed to monarchs...it's been quite a journey.
The work of Professor Yang's MMMILC crew fascinated him, and the site became his "adopted back yard." At first, Snyder just watched, then he began photographing "the insect life on the plants." At the end of the project's official monitoring period, he "secured the cooperation of city staff" so he could continue maintaining the milkweeds without the loss of spring growth to the annual fire-suppression mowings.
Snyder says he "especially enjoys watching insect behavior and interaction, both within and between species and in relation to the host plants, as well as tracking how individual populations change during the seasons and from year to year."
"I am most grateful to the Bohart Museum and the frequent assistance of their remarkable staff and associates," Snyder said.
The Bohart Museum, founded in 1946, is directed by Lynn Kimsey, UC Davis distinguished professor of entomology. It is the global home of eight million insect specimens, as well as the live "petting zoo" and an insect-themed gift shop stocked with t-shirts, hoodies, books, posters, jewelry, collecting equipment and more. Named for UC Davis professor and noted entomologist Richard Bohart, it is open to the public from 8 a.m. to noon, and 1 to 5 p.m., Mondays through Thursdays. More information is available on the website at https://bohart.ucdavis.edu or by contacting bmuseum@ucdavis.edu.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
This is a story of what might have been that never was and never will be and it all has to do with Hammock's cockroaches.
Hammock, who holds a joint appointment with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, remembers the scenario well.
While on the UC Riverside faculty, he worked on two cultures of very large roaches. One was the wingless Madagascar hissing cockroach, Gromphadorhina portentosa, and the other, the South American cave cockroach, Blaberus giganteus with "lovely translucent wings."
When he published a paper on his research, the U.S. Department of Food and Agriculture discovered that these 20-year-old cultures had never been registered.
“So, I registered, certified and chugged on with the research,” recalled Hammock. “Then one day both cultures vanished. I was frantic.”
The next day the chair of the department walked into his lab, gave him $10, and told him: “This is your share.”
The chair had sold the roaches that “no one was using” to a Hollywood movie company. “This was the main project in my lab so I went to Hollywood and tried to get the insects back,” Hammock lamented. “No way.”
Hammock's prized roaches, perhaps destined for greatness in the scientific world of cockroach literature, instead starred as evil roaches in the 1975-released movie, “Bug,” an American horror film based on Thomas Page's novel, ”The Hephaestus Plague (1973).”
The plot: A massive earthquake releases mutant cockroaches that create fire by rubbing together their cerci, a pair of small sensory appendages at the end of their abdomen that function somewhat like antennae. However, these mutant roaches die because they cannot survive in the low air pressure on the Earth's surface. Nonetheless, Professor James Parmiter (actor Bradford Dillman, 1930-2018), manages to keep one alive in a pressure chamber and breeds it with a modern cockroach, creating a breed of intelligent, flying, super-cockroaches. Chaos erupts in the small farming community.
Chaos also erupted on the movie set—and not just because some of the actors hated roaches.
“In a twist of fate,” Hammock said, “the movie company had rented the zoology building during the summer at UC Riverside for filming evil cockroaches from the center of the planet that got in people's hair and set them on fire.” In the process, the flames ignited a minor fire in the building.
An image of zoo building and a Hammock-reared roach appear on the IMDB poster. “After they finished shooting, I heard that they released the roaches on campus,” Hammock said.
“I would never find them,” he lamented. "But my son (Tom Hammock) who now is in the film industry loved the story."
Madagascar hissing cockroaches, nicknamed "hissers," measure two to three inches long and are big in the pet trade. They are a popular attraction in the UC Davis Bohart Museum of Entomology's live “petting zoo.”
Hammock's roach-rearing days at UC Riverside included giving a hissing roach to his mother because “she wanted a pet so I gave her one.”
“She had for several years as a pet. But she brought it back because she could not get her lady friends to babysit when she traveled. It terrified our cat but finally settled into an uneasy relationship.”
Viewers' description of Bug ranged from “the best of killer bug films” and “a scream fest” to “something that really freaked me out.” One reviewer, noting what happened to Professor Parmiter's wife, wrote “Bug, you light up my wife.”
Looking back, Hammock noted that "The science was actually a serious effort to work out the biosynthetic pathway of the hormone that regulates insect development, and then disrupt it for insect control. Sadly, I only published the first step before Hollywood turned the roaches into science fiction film history."
