- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The event takes place from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in 122 Briggs Hall. Meredith Cezner, graduate student in the Louie Yang lab, is the host and will introduce him. Matute researches the genetics, behavior, and ecological context of reproductive isolation in the genus Drosophila.
His abstract: "Gene flow between species has been thought to oppose the divergence process, but there has been no systematic treatment of how species persist in the face of gene flow in secondary contact. Furthermore, while hybridization is known to generate new species in plants and fungi, it is not known how prevalent is the creative role of hybridization is in animal speciation. An approach to address the relative importance of hybrid speciation is experimental evolution. Our results test the possibility of hybrid speciation at different phylogenetic scales as a formal test of the likelihood of hybrid speciation. This project constitutes the first experimental approach to test the possible role of hybridization in generating new animal species."
Much of Matute's work examines the interactions between island endemics and cosmopolitan species in the Seychelles archipelago, where natural zones of secondary contact allow for the study of hybridization and reproductive isolation in the field. He received this year's Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution, an award recognizing “the accomplishments and future promise of an outstanding young evolutionary biologist."
Matute obtained a dual degree in biology and microbiology at Universidad de Los Andes in Columbia in 2005. He completed his doctorate in ecology and evolution with Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2010.
One of his research papers, "Macroevolutionary Speciation Rates are Decoupled from the Evolution of Intrinsic Reproductive Isolation in Drosophila and Birds," was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The abstract:
"The rate at which speciation occurs varies greatly among different kinds of organisms and is frequently assumed to result from species- or clade-specific factors that influence the rate at which populations acquire reproductive isolation. This premise leads to a fundamental prediction that has never been tested: Organisms that quickly evolve prezygotic or postzygotic reproductive isolation should have faster rates of speciation than organisms that slowly acquire reproductive isolation. We combined phylogenetic estimates of speciation rates from Drosophila and birds with a method for analyzing interspecific hybridization data to test whether the rate at which individual lineages evolve reproductive isolation predicts their macroevolutionary rate of species formation. We find that some lineages evolve reproductive isolation much more quickly than others, but this variation is decoupled from rates of speciation as measured on phylogenetic trees. For the clades examined here, reproductive isolation—especially intrinsic, postzygotic isolation—does not seem to be the rate-limiting control on macroevolutionary diversification dynamics. These results suggest that factors associated with intrinsic reproductive isolation may have less to do with the tremendous variation in species diversity across the evolutionary tree of life than is generally assumed."
See more of his research publications.
The remainder of noon-hour seminars for the winter quarter:
Jan. 21
George Dimopoulous
Title of Seminar: "Exploiting Infection Bottlenecks in the Mosquito to Control Human Disease"
Director of the Parasitology Core Facility
John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Professor, Molecular Microbiology and Immunology
Baltimore, Md.
Nominator/host: Jiawen Xu, graduate student, Bruce Hammock lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Jan. 28
Michael Parrella
Title of Seminar: "To Antarctica and Back: The Search for Beligica antarctica (Diptera; Chironomidae)”
Professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Feb. 4
Jay Evans
Title of Seminar: "What's It Like Inside a Bee? Genetic Approaches to Honey Bee hHealth"
Research entomologist
USDA Agricultural Research Service (USDA/ARS)
Beltsville, MD.
Nominator/host: Marin County Beekeepers
Feb. 11
Amro Zayed
Title of Seminar: "Bee Genes, Behavior and Adaptation"
Professor, Department of Biology
York University
Toronto, Canada
Nominator/host: Brian Johnson, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Feb. 18
Steven Frank
Title of Seminar: "Can Forests Take the Heat? Managing Pests and Ecosystem Services in a Warming Climate"
Assistant Professor, Department of Biology
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, N.C.
Nominator/host: Michael Parrella, professor and chair, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
March 4
Brian Wiegmann
Executive Director of Genome Research Laboratory
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, N.C.
Nominator/host:Steve Nadler, professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
March 11
Thomas Eltz
Title of Seminar: "Perfume Making and Signalling in Orchid bees: New Light on an Old Enigma"
Chemical Ecologist
University of Bochum
Bochum, Germany
Nominator/host: Santiago Ramirez, faculty member, UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology
Coodinating the seminars is Professor Steve Nadler at sanadler@ucdavis.edu.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
"Parasitoid Palooza! will set the theme for the Bohart Museum of Entomology open house on Sunday, Jan. 11.
The family-friendly event, free and open to the public, takes place from 1 to 4 p.m. in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus.
"Most everyone knows that mantids eat other insects or that ladybird beetles (lady bugs) consume lots of aphids, but there is another way insects eat other insects," commented Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator.
"An insect parasitoid is a species whose immatures live off of one insect host, usually eating it from the inside out," she said. "It is part of their life cycle and the host dies. This sounds like a weird way to make a living, but there are more species of parasitoids than there are insects with any other single kind of life history. The movie Alien with Sigourney Weaver co-opts this phenomenon, but in reality there are no parasitoids on humans or other vertebrates."
The Bohart open house will spotlight this unusual life cycle. Wasps, flies and beetles are parasitoids to many different insect groups.
Senior museum scientist Steve Heydon, the Bohart collections manager, is a world authority on Pteromalids, or jewel wasps, a group of tiny parasitoids. He will be on hand to talk about them.
Another group of parasitoids that will be highlighted will be the Strepsiptera, or Twisted-Wing Parasites, an order of insects that the late UC Davis entomologist Richard M. Bohart (1913-2007), for whom the museum is named, researched for his doctorate in 1938. An entire family of Strepsiptera, the Bohartillidae, is named in honor of Professor Bohart.
Live parasitoids from the lab of Michael Parrella, professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomolology and Nematology will be showcased. They include Encarsa, Eretmocerus, Diglyphus and Aphidius.
"Parasitoid Palooza" promises to be a fun and wacky celebration of the diversity of life, Yang said. A family-friendly craft activity is planned as well.
Along with parasitoids, native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology, will show some live male and female "teddy bear" bees or Valley carpenter bees. Allan Jones of Davis, a noted insect photographer, delivered some to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility from a friend's cut-down apple tree in Davis.
Directed by Lynn Kimsey, professor of entomology at UC Davis, the Bohart Museum 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. Noted entomologist Richard M. Bohart (1913-2007) founded the museum.
Special attractions include a “live” petting zoo, featuring Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and tarantulas. Visitors are invited to hold 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's 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 and on major holidays. Admission is free. Open houses, focusing on specific themes, are held on weekends throughout the academic year.
The remaining schedule of open houses:
- Sunday, Feb. 8: “Biodiversity Museum Day,” noon to 4 p.m.
- Saturday, March 14: “Pollination Nation,” 1 to 4 p.m.
- Saturday, April 18: UC Davis Picnic Day, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
- Sunday, May 17: “Name That Bug! How About Bob?” 1 to 4 p.m.
- Saturday, July 18: “Moth Night,” 8 to 11 p.m.
More information is available by contacting (530) 752-0493 or Tabatha Yang, education and public outreach coordinator at tabyang@ucdavis.edu
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology will offer a two-day queen-rearing techniques short course, March 28-29 in the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road, UC Davis campus.
Extension apiculturist Elina Lastro Niño will teach the course, assisted by co-instructors, staff research associates Bernardo Niño and Billy Synk.
“This course is perfect for those who have some beekeeping experience and would like to move on to the next step of rearing their own queens or maybe even trying their luck at bee breeding,” Elina Lastro Niño said.
Topics will include honey bee queen biology, basics of selective honey bee breeding programs, various queen-rearing techniques, hygienic behavior testing, and assessment of varroa mite levels.
Participants will have the opportunity to learn about and practice multiple methods for queen rearing. “We will go through a step-by-step process for queen rearing via grafting, including setting up cell buildings and mating nucs,” she said.
At the end of the course, participants will be able to check their grafting success and local participants can take their grafted queen cells from their practice exercises, back to their apiaries. The participants also will learn techniques for assessing varroa loads in colonies and evaluate hygienic behavior.
The course is limited to 14 participants. It will include lectures, hands-on exercises, and a tour of the department's Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee, located next to the facility.
The $200 registration fee covers the cost of course materials (including a set of grafting equipment, grafting frame with bars, plastic queen cups and a grafting tool); breakfast, lunch and refreshments.
Participants will be responsible for obtaining their own lodging. For directions, visit http://elninobeelab.ucdavis.edu/qrtsc.html. For more information on registering for the short course, contact Bernardo Niño at elninobeelab@gmail.com
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Rosenberg's seminar is from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in 122 Briggs Hall. His is the first in a series of winter quarter seminars sponsored by the department.
“Infecting humans can be a successful career move for ambitious animal pathogens, especially for RNA viruses,” Rosenberg says. “The path from vertebrate to human requires some type of contact and for some pathogens that is provided by mosquitoes, ticks or other blood-feeding arthropods. Nearly 40 percent of the 213 viruses causing human disease are transmitted by arthropods (arboviruses) and all these are zoonoses.”
“New viral pathogens are discovered every year but an analysis of the historical trends showed that the rates of discovery depend on how and where we look,” Rosenberg noted. “ Discovery of arboviruses has lagged since 1965 as dedicated surveillance has weakened in the tropics. Sampling of animal populations can uncover a rich variety of viruses but gives little indication of emergent potential. The most sensitive sentinel for emerging human pathogens is humans.”
Since graduating from Johns Hopkins, he's spent his career – much of it in Bangladesh, Thailand and Kenya –working for the National Institutes of Healthy, U.S. Army, USDA and CDC on various aspects of the transmission of vector-borne diseases, mostly malaria, but also Lyme disease, plague, tularemia. His expertise also includes the influence of climate on disease ecology and vector-borne diseases.
“More recently I've concentrated on designing strategies and programs for identifying the causes of undiagnosed infectious disease, especially in Uganda, Indonesia and the U.S.,” he said. “I do the typical late career things, like editing Emerging Infectious Diseases, chairing the WHO working group on dengue and,” he quipped,” sleeping at committee meetings.”
For the remainder of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology speakers from Jan. 14 through June 3 see this page.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The seminars are from 12:10 to 1 p.m. and most will be recorded for later viewing on UCTV.
Jan. 7
Ronald Rosenberg
Title of Seminar: "Detecting the Emergence of Novel Arthropod-Borne Pathogens"
Associate Director for Global Health in the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Fort Collins, Colo.
Nominators/hosts: Professor Shirley Luckhart, Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, UC Davis School of Medicine and graduate student advisor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and Professor Ed Lewis and Distinguished Professor James R. Carey, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Jan. 14
Daniel Matute
Title of Seminar: "Hybrid Speciation in Drosophila"
Assistant Professor, Department of Biology
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, N.C.
Nominator/host: Meredith Cenzer, graduate student, Louie Yang lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Jan. 21
George Dimopoulous
Title of Seminar: "Exploiting Infection Bottlenecks in the Mosquito to Control Human Disease"
Director of the Parasitology Core Facility
John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Professor, Molecular Microbiology and Immunology
Baltimore, Md.
Nominator/host: Jiawen Xu, graduate student, Bruce Hammock lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Jan. 28
Michael Parrella
Title of Seminar: "To Antarctica and Back: The Search for Belgica antarctica Jacobs, 1900 (Diptera; Chironomidae)"
Professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Feb. 4
Jay Evans
Title of Seminar: "What's It Like Inside a Bee? Genetic Approaches to Honey Bee Health"
Research entomologist
USDA Agricultural Research Service (USDA/ARS)
Beltsville, MD.
Nominator/host: Marin County Beekeepers
Feb. 11
Amro Zayed
Title of Seminar: "Honey Bee Behavioral Genomics: Worker Behavior and Adaptation"
Associate Professor, Department of Biology
York University
Toronto, Canada
Nominator/host: Brian Johnson, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Feb. 18 (CANCELLED, due to inclement weather and flight cancellation)
Steven Frank
Title of Seminar: "Can Forests Take the Heat? Managing Pests and Ecosystem Services in a Warming Climate"
Assistant Professor, Department of Biology
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, N.C.
Nominator/host: Michael Parrella, professor and chair, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
March 11
Thomas Eltz
Title of Seminar: "Perfume Making and Signalling in Orchid bees: New Light on an Old Enigma"
Chemical Ecologist
University of Bochum
Bochum, Germany
Nominator/host: Santiago Ramirez, faculty member, UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology
April 1
George Kennedy
Title of Seminar: "Modeling the Epidemiology of Tomato Spotted Wilt: Understanding the Role of Thrips Population Dynamics and Virus Inoculum Sources "
William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Agriculture
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, N.C.
Nominator/host: Diane Ullman, professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
April 8
Michael Strand
Title of Seminar: "Role of Microorganisms in Growth, Development and Reproduction of Mosquitoes”
Regents Professor
University of Georgia
Athens, Ga.
Nominators/hosts: Professor Shirley Luckhart, Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, UC Davis School of Medicine and graduate student advisor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and Professor Ed Lewis and Distinguished Professor James R. Carey, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
April 15
Eric Palevsky
Title of Seminar: "Plant-Feeding Phytoseiids: Cheliceral Morphology, Feeding Mechanism and Host Plant Interactions" Acarologist, Department of Entomology
Newe-Ya'ar Research Center
Agricultural Research Organization
Ministry of Agriculture
Ramat Yishay, Israel
Nominator/host: Michael Parrella, professor and chair, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
April 22
John Lane
Title of Seminar: "Explorations of the Hargy Caldera, New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea"
Professional Geologist/Registered Environmental Assessor
Environmental Scientist/Certified Mold Inspector
Chico Environmental Science and Planning
Chico, Calif.
Nominator/host:Lynn Kimsey, professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
April 29
Matt Daughtery
Title of Seminar: "Understanding the Impact of an Invasive Vector: Sharpshooter Transmission Efficiency, Behavior, and Pathogen Spread"
Assistant Extension Specialist and Principal Investigator
UC Riverside
Riverside, Calif.
Nominator/host: Jay Rosenheim
May 13
Amy Toth
Title of Seminar: "Molecular Evolution in Insect Societies: Insights from Genomics of Primitively Social Paper Wasps"
Assistant Professor, Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology
Department of Entomology
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa
Nominator/host: Brian Johnson, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
May 20
John Hawdon
Topic: "Molecular Mechanisms of Hookworm Infection"
Research Center for Neglected Diseases of Poverty, Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Tropical Medicine, The George Washington University
Washington, D.C.
Nominator/host: Steve Nadler
May 27
John "Jack" Longino
Title of Seminar: "Project ADMAC: Ant Diversity of the Mesoamerican Corridor"
Professor of Biology
Adjunct Curator of Entomology, Utah Museum of Natural History, University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah
Nominator/host: Phil Ward, professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
June 3
Mike Singer
Title of Seminar: "One Butterfly, Six Host Shifts"
Professor, Department of Integrative Biology, College of Natural Sciences
Specialty: Butterfly ecology and behavior
(Formerly with University of Texas, Austin, Texas)
Nominator/host: Meredith Cenzer, graduate student, Louie Yang lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
