- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The protein-rich delicacies drew mixed reactions at the “Bugs and Beer” event hosted recently in the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science's Silverado Vineyards Sensory Theatre at the University of California, Davis.
“Don't worry—be hoppy,” celebrity bug chef David George Gordon, author of the award-winning “Eat-a-Bug” cookbook, told the budding entomophagists as they eyed the colorful kebobs threaded with grasshoppers and green and red peppers.
Quipped Gordon: “Some people call them 'sheesh-kebobs.'”
Gordon, from Seattle, joined “The Pope of Foam” Charlie Bamforth--the Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Malting and Brewing Sciences in the UC Davis Department of Food Science and Technology--to pair six bug dishes with six different beers. The theme: “Bugs and Beer—Why Crickets and Kölsch Might Be Matches Made in Heaven."
Their quips and puns punctuated the four-hour event. Coordinator Elizabeth Luu, a UC Davis student-employee at RMI who originated the idea of the beer-bug fest, praised the humorous duo as “a match made in heaven.”
Clare Hasler-Lewis, RMI executive director, welcomed the capacity crowd. “Who's going to want to eat bugs--and drink beer with them? I did eat a cricket this morning—without beer—and it was good.”
As it turned out, the beer-bug fest was a kick: “one of the best-ever events we've had at RMI,” said Hasler-Lewis, who said "Let's do this again!" Some participants asked that it be an annual event.
Gordon and Bamforth paired:
- Flavored mealworms with Ruhstaller Gilt Edge Lager
- Wasabi sago worms with Lagunitas Pils
- Baked European house crickets with Sudwerk Hefeweizen
- Cambodian crickets with Gordon Biersch Winterbock
- Ant and pear salad with Sierra Nevada Boomerang IPA
- Teriyaki grasshopper kebobs with Rubicon Angus Scottish Ale
- Cricket flour cookies with Heretic Chocolate Hazelnut Porter
- Chocolate-dipped chapulines (grasshoppers) with Berryessa Whippersnapper English Mild
UC Davis students majoring in food science, brewing science, or entomology prepared the bug dishes, using the chef's bugs and recipes.
"This event was a fun way to introduce a sustainable food supply that is as common in other areas of the world as our hamburger," Wishon said. "While I don't expect the 'cricket burger' to replace hamburger anytime soon, it is important that we start opening our food horizons now before it is no longer a choice. I spent all my time in the kitchen--which is laughable for anyone who knows me--but if anything could make that happen it would be by putting insects in the kitchen with me. This was an experience I will not soon forget! Strangely, my friends and family have declined to let me practice my new cooking skill to make them dinner."
Anne Schellman, manager of the UC Davis California Center for Urban Horticulture who attended with friend Javier Miramontes, a community education specialist for UC Agriculture and Natural Resources in Fresno, said her favorites were the European house crickets andgrasshopper kebobs. “They were both chewy but crunchy and had good flavor,” she said.
She wasn't so sure about the Cambodian crickets. “I ate the head and part of the body--after I pulled off the legs and played with the wings,” Schellman said. “It was just too darned big and intimidating to eat it (all).”
“It had an interesting flavor, and the ‘meat' inside actually kind of looked like an artichoke heart in coloring and also texture. Javier ate the cricket whole--I didn't even see him do it he was so fast. A piece of leg got stuck in his throat, and he was trying to keep from gagging, poor guy!”
And they were, Selby confirmed.
Sago worms are the immature larvae of the red palm weevil. “Sago worms eat palm trees, and we can't import sago worms,” Gordon said. “If they got loose in Los Angeles, they would change the identity of the city.”
RMI program representative Evan White, who does design and communications, said he especially loved two dishes: the pear-spinach-ant salad “with the crunchy weaver ants” and the dessert, the chocolate-dipped chapuline grasshoppers. “But then anything with chocolate is delicious,” White said.
White did not eat the Cambodian crickets, which he described as “as big as a small mouse,” and which Bamforth characterized as “a full-flavored meat dish.”
“How many of you ate the full-flavored meat dish?” Bamforth asked after the pairing. “How many of you drank the beer?”
In his talk on "Adventures in Entomophagy: “Waiter, There's No Fly in My Soup!” Gordon said that 80 percent of the world's culture eat bugs and two-thirds of all animal species are insects. "Bug-eating is good for the planet. Bugs are nutritious, delicious, cheap and plentiful.”
“John the Baptist was the most famous bug eater,” Gordon said. “The Bible tells us he ate locusts and honey. Angelina Jolie is the second most famous bug-eater. And I'm third, the godfather of insect cuisine.”
“Whether a country eats bugs has a lot to do with dependence on agriculture,” Gordon said. “Insects are in direct competition with humans for food. But as the human population grows, we can't feed them all (what Americans are accustomed to eating). People are eating hamburgers when they should be eating bugs.”
“In our culture, bugs are often considered a novelty food, such as tequila-flavored lollipops,” the chef told the crowd. However, cricket energy bars "have gone mainstream," and cookies made with cricket flour are becoming more and more popular.
“Insects are the food of the future,” Gordon declared.
He cautioned that all bugs should be cooked, as cooking kills any parasites. Bug chefs must also take special precautions in preparing stinging arthropods.
He paused. “How many of you take calcium pills? If your fingernails keep breaking, eat more crickets. They're rich in calcium. And how many of you are anemic? Termites are rich in iron.”
Food choice is just a matter of what we're accustomed to eating,” Gordon said. He asked how many eat sushi (raw fish), pickled pig's feet, chicken eggs and lobster. “Lobster used to be served to inmates in prison on the East Coast. And talk about the all-time weird food--the chicken egg comes from the butt of a chicken."
You shouldn't eat just any bug, Gordon said “You don't want to eat that cockroach that crawled under your refrigerator or a bug in the field sprayed with pesticides.” He advocates that “you raise your own insects under hygienic conditions or order bugs from supply companies.”
Gordon said it's only right—and it's justice--that we humans eat the pests that eat our food in our garden. Tomato hornworms, for one. One of his recipes calls for tomato green hornworms, with olive oil, green tomatoes, pepper, white cornmeal and basil. Gordon said it's important to be environmentally friendly and not to use pesticides, especially if you're going to eat the pests.
Gordon said the key ingredients in his signature dish, “Orthopteran Orzo” (orzo is a rice-shaped pasta) are three-week old cricket nymphs. Gordon recalled serving the dish at one event and a young boy, a pre-teen, kept returning for more. “Don't they ever feed you at home?” Gordon asked him after the fourth helping. “But this is way better than anything my mom makes,” the boy said.
In his talk titled "Bugs Are No Strangers to Brewers," Bamforth discussed the intricacies of beer brewing and why he paired certain beers with certain bug dishes. He also touched on beer preference: what some people love, others may loathe. Bamforth likened some beers (not served at the event) as reminding him of “cat's breath, newly filled baby diapers, and wet horse blanket with mouse pee.” At one beer tasting, a beer reminded him of “a wet dog urinating in a telephone booth.”
Bamforth said bugs and beer go together in another way, but not a good way. A beer's key ingredient is a grain, and insects may contaminate them. For example, hop aphids may contaminate hops and the saw-toothed beetles, the rice. Grain contamination can also involve such organisms as bacteria, powdery mildew virus and fungi
Some of the entomophagists at the bug-beer fest jokingly inquired if the bugs displayed by the Bohart Museum of Entomology were for eating, as well as for viewing. Arachnids included Tanzanian Giant Whipspider, Costa Rican Red Tarantula and Salmon Pink Bird-Eating Tarantula.
“No, they're not for eating,” said White, holding a millipede as people milled around him talking about Gordon's recipes, including “Superworm Tempura With Plum Dipping Sauce,” “Pest-O,” “Larval Latkes,” “Curried Termite Stew,” “Cream of Katydid Soup,“ and "Ant Jemina's Buckwheat-Bug Griddlecakes.”
In fact, Gordon said millipedes are poisonous and should not be substituted for centipedes in recipes. He writes in his cookbook: "These animals (millipedes) secrete a foul-smelling fluid that, in some species, may contain traces of hydrogen cyanide--not good, unless you're from the Borgia household."
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
His seminar will be recorded for later viewing on UCTV.
"Ecologists have long recognized that species interactions change over time, due to temporal variation in abiotic environments and in the abundance and relative life stages of interacting species," Yang says. "Despite - or perhaps because of - the ubiquitous role of time in structuring species interactions, other aspects of community complexity have often been emphasized ahead of temporal complexity. However, a growing emphasis on understanding how phenology, ontogeny, stage-structure and transient event-driven dynamics affect species interactions may signal the re-emergence of a 'temporally explicit' perspective in community ecology. A temporally explicit view of community ecology aims to understand how species interactions change over time, and the consequences of shifts in this timing."
In his talk he will suggest "how a temporally explicit view of species interactions could build upon the ubiquitous and implicit consideration of time that is already fundamental to ecology. If we step away from common simplifying assumptions about the constancy of community structure and process, what new questions emerge? This introduction to the session will attempt to identify some common themes that are emerging from a temporally explicit perspective in ecology, illustrated with examples from recent studies in multiple systems."
Yang said the key emerging themes of this synthesis are
- In systems where multiple dynamic processes operate on different timescales, it is important to consider sequential (as opposed to strictly alternative) hypotheses;
- The study of species interactions should consider both phenology and ontogeny, especially when stage-structured interactions occur throughout life histories;
- Biotic and abiotic constraints on species interactions can define windows of opportunity in time, where quantitative shifts in the timing of key events (such as physical disturbances or resource pulses) can qualitatively alter life history outcomes;
- A temporally explicit perspective seeks to explain the mechanisms of historical contingency in community assembly; and
- The continued development of a temporally explicit perspective in ecology is important for understanding how real-world species interactions are coordinated in time, and the potential implications of disrupting this coordination.
Yang's research interests include community ecology, species interactions, temporal variation, extreme events in nature, and the integration of ontogeny and phenology. Last year received a prestigious National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award of $600,000. He was one of four young UC Davis faculty members selected for the award. Yang is studying the importance of timing in interactions between plants, animals and their environment, specifically studying the monarch butterfly and milkweed. Species interactions change with the seasons and with different life stages, and climate change may disrupt these interactions, for example, if caterpillars emerge before food sources are available.
Yang earned his bachelor's degree (ecology and evolution) from Cornell University in 1999 and his doctorate from UC Davis in 2006, studying with entomology professor and ecologist Rick Karban. Yang conducted postdoctoral research at UC Santa Barbara before returning to UC Davis as a faculty member in 2009. While at UC Santa Barbara, he served as a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
“Equally apparent are the migrations of insects like armyworm moths and locusts that have severe negative impacts on agricultural systems,” says Hugh Dingle, an emeritus professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, and a worldwide authority on animal migration.
“What is not so appreciated, however, are the numerous tiny insects, mites, and spiderlings that also migrate.”
“Even to the most casual observer of nature it is apparent that migration is a conspicuous behavior for many organisms,” said Dingle, author of the newly published second edition of Migration: The Biology of Life on the Move (Oxford University Press), a sequel to the first edition published in 1996. “The great whales move up and down our coasts and are often viewable from promontories like Pt. Reyes; millions of birds appear in high latitudes to breed in the spring and depart in the fall; and millions of bright orange monarch butterflies inspire awe with their migrations from North America to overwintering sites in Mexico or on the coast of California.”
Winged aphids and ballooning spiders often escape the human eye. ““On summer evenings at temperate latitudes the air to considerable altitudes is often filled with winged aphids and ballooning spiders that with the aid of selected winds can migrate for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers,” he said. “Birds, grasshoppers, and moths are also adept at selecting winds of the right speed and direction, the more impressive because many of these migrations are at high altitude or at night when the ground cannot provide information on direction. Recent studies have shown that information may be derived from the kinetic energy of wind turbulence.”
The book covers a wide taxonomic diversity of organisms from aphids to whales. Included is a discussion of recently developed techniques, such as radar and geolocators, used for tracking migrants. “These methods,” Dingle said, “reveal just how astonishing some migratory journeys can be; godwits and plovers, for example, make nonstop flights over the central Pacific Ocean from Alaska to Australia and New Zealand.”
However, not all migration is a round trip; sometimes it's one-way. “Important defining behavioral characteristics are specific departure and arrival tactics and the refusal to stop even in favorable habitats until the migration program is complete,” Dingle says. “In the words of National Geographic reporter David Quammen migrants ‘are flat-out just gonna get there.'
“The program or syndrome includes specific modifications of metabolic physiology like enhanced fat storage to fuel migration and of sensory systems to detect inputs from the sun, stars, and magnetic field lines to determine compass direction. Intimately involved in the latter are daily and yearly biological clocks. The pathway followed is an outcome of the syndrome of migratory behavior and is part of the ecology that provides the natural selection acting to determine the evolution of migration.”
“Natural selection acts differently on long versus short lives. With long lives there are usually many opportunities to produce offspring; with short lives there may be only one,” Dingle said. “Thus reproductive opportunities may determine when and where to migrate. Migrating aphids postpone reproduction until they colonize new host plants; birds reproduce following migration in the spring, but not in the fall. Some birds and insects use migration to exploit ‘rich patches' and breed in different places in different years or even in the same year.
There are also insects that alternate between winged generations for migration and colonization and wingless generations devoted exclusively to high reproductive effort once colonization is accomplished. Genes influence not only migratory effort but also the relation between behavior, reproduction, and morphological traits such as wing length (longer narrower wings in migrants).
“'They are flat-out just gonna get there,' as David Quammen said.”
National Geographic featured Dingle in its cover story on “Great Migrations” in November 2010. LiveScience interviewed him for its November 2010 piece on“Why Do Animals Migrate?”
Dingle, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Animal Behavior Society, has done research throughout the world, including the UK, Kenya, Thailand, Panama, Germany and Australia.
He served as a professor at UC Davis Department of Entomology from 1982 to 2002, achieving emeritus status in 2003. He chaired the Animal Behavior Graduate Group from 1985 to 1988; and was acting director of the Animal Behavior Center, 2000-2002.
Dingle is a former secretary of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology and past president of the Animal Behavior Society.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
ScienceDaily reported on the research in its Oct. 28th edition.
The UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology team included Brian Johnson and Johnson lab researchers W. Cameron Jasper and Joey Atallah; and molecular geneticist Joanna Chiu. Other co-authors were Timothy Linksvayer of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and Daniel Friedman, then a UC Davis undergraduate student in the Artyom Kopp lab.
“Whether coding or regulatory sequence change is more important to the evolution of phenotypic novelty is one of biology's major unresolved questions. The field of evo-devo has shown that in early development changes to regulatory regions are the dominant mode of genetic change, but whether this extends to the evolution of novel phenotypes in the adult organism is unclear. Here we conduct ten RNA-Seq experiments across both novel and conserved tissues in the honey bee to determine to what extent post-developmental novelty is based on changes to the coding regions of genes. We make several discoveries. First, we show that with respect to novel physiological functions in the adult animal, positively selected tissue-specific genes of high expression underlie novelty by conferring specialized cellular functions. Such genes are often, but not always taxonomically restricted genes (TRGs). We further show that positively selected genes, whether TRGs or conserved genes, are the least connected genes within gene expression networks. Overall, this work suggests that the evo-devo paradigm is limited, and that the evolution of novelty, post-development, follows additional rules. Specifically, evo-devo stresses that high network connectedness (repeated use of the same gene in many contexts) constrains coding sequence change as it would lead to negative pleiotropic effects. Here we show that in the adult animal, the converse is true: genes with low network connectedness (TRGs and tissue-specific conserved genes) underlie novel phenotypes by rapidly changing coding sequence to perform new specialized functions.”
Links:
Read research paper, “Large Scale Coding Sequence Change Underlies the Evolution of Post-Developmental Novelty in Honey Bees,” Molecular Biology and Evolution
Read "Bee's knees for identifying genetic triggers of novel adult traits," ScienceDaily news story
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Fox, a leading evolutionary ecologist, specializes in insect genetiics and behavior and evolutionary ecology. Host is Professor Jay Rosenheim of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
One of Fox's research subjects is a beetle, Callosobruchus maculatus, commonly known as the cowpea weevil or cowpea seed beetle. A member of the leaf beetle family, Chrysomelidae, it is a common pest of stored legumes. The beetle is found every continent except Antaractica.
Fox received his bachelor's degree in zoology in 1987 from UC Davis, and his doctorate in 1993 from UC Berkeley through the Department of Integrative Biology. While in graduate school, he worked at UC Davis for three years (1991-1993) with Hugh Dingle, now emeritus professor of entomology.
Fox joined the University of Kentucky's entomology faculty in 1999. Previously he worked at Fordham University, New York, his first faculty position (1996-1999).
He completed postdoctoral research at the Department of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina (1993-1996), working in the laboratory of Timothy Mousseau.
Fox lists his research interests as:
- Ecology and Evolution of Life Histories
- Body Size, Sexual Size Dimorphism
- Egg Size
- Phenotypic Plasticity
- Aging and Senescence
- Maternal Effects
- Inbreeding Depression
- Insect-Plant Interactions
- Diet Evolution
Adaptation to Host Plants - Insect Behavioral Ecology
- Egg Laying Decisions
- Sexual Selection on Body Size / Sexual Dimorphism
Some of his recently published papers on inbreeding depression:
Reed, David H.; Fox, Charles W.; Enders, Laramy S.; et al. 2012. Inbreeding-stress interactions: evolutionary and conservation consequences. Year in Evolutionary Biology, Book Series: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1256:33-48.
Fox, C. W.; Xu, J.; Wallin, W. G.; et al. 2012. Male inbreeding status affects female fitness in a seed-feeding beetle. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 25:29-37.
Fox, Charles W.; Reed, David H. 2011. Inbreeding depression increases with environmental stress: an experimental study and meta-analysis. Evolution 65:246-258.
Fox, Charles W.; Stillwell, R. Craig; Wallin, William G.; et al. 2011. Inbreeding-environment interactions for fitness: complex relationships between inbreeding depression and temperature stress in a seed-feeding beetle. Evolutionary Ecology 25:25-43.
His seminar will be recorded for later viewing on UCTV.
Upcoming seminars:
Wednesday, Nov. 12
Louie Yang
Assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, specializing in ecology
Title: "Pulses, Phenology and Ontogeny: Towards a More Temporally Explicit Framework for Understanding Species Interactions?"
Wednesday, Nov. 19
Ray Hong
Associate professor of biology, California State University, Northridge, specializing in nematology
Title: “A Fatal Attraction: Regulation of Development and Behavior in the Nematode Pristionchus pacificus by a Beetle Pheromone”
Host: Valerie Williamson, professor of nematology, Department of Entomology and Nematology
Wednesday, Nov. 26
Doris Bachtrog, lab
Associate professor of integrative biology, UC Berkeley, specializing in evolutionary and functional genomics
Title: "Numerous Transitions of Sex Chromosomes in Diptera"
Host: Michael Parrella, professor and chair, Department of Entomology and Nematology
Wednesday, Dec. 3
To be announced
Wednesday, Dec. 10
Sawyer Fuller
Postdoctoral researcher, Harvard University
Title: "RoboBee: Using the Engineering Toolbox to Understand the Flight Apparatus of Flying Insects"
Host: James Carey, distinguished professor of entomology
This seminar is being remote broadcast to UC Davis via internet
Plans call for recording the seminars, coordinated by Professor James Carey, for later posting on the web.
