- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
DAVIS--Professor Steve Nadler, coordinator of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology's fall seminars, has announced the list of the department's noonhour seminars.
The seminars begin Oct. 1 and continue through Dec. 10. They will take place on Wednesdays from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in Room 122 of Briggs Hall, located off Kleiber Hall Drive, UC Davis.
The schedule as of Sept. 11:
Wednesday, Oct. 1
Yigen Chen
Associate project scientist and entomologist, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Title: "Interactions Between Two Invasive Wood-Boring Insects with Their Respective Host Plants"
Host: Steve Seybold of the USDA's Forest Service and an affiliate of the Department of Entomology and Nematology
Wednesday, Oct. 8
Vaughn Walton
Associate professor and Extension entomologist
Lead investigator, Spotted Wing Drosophila Project
Oregon State University
Title: "Complexities Associated with Two Invasive Pests: Challenges and Opportunities"
Hosts: Assistant professor Joanna Chiu and distinguished professor Frank Zalom, Department of Entomology and Nematology
Wednesday, Oct. 15
Surendra Dara
Strawberry and Vegetable Crops and affiliated IPM Advisor, University of California Cooperative Extension, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties.
Title: "Thinking Outside the Cubicle to Provide Practical Solutions to the Farmers"
Host: Michael Parrella, professor and chair of the Department of Entomology and Nematology
Wednesday, Oct. 22
Blaine Cole
Professor, University of Houston, specializing in evolution, ecology and behavior.
Title: "Colony Growth and Fitness in Harvester Ants"
Host: Marshall McMunn, graduate student, Louie Yang lab, Department of Entomology and Nematology
Wednesday, Oct. 29
Clifford Ohmart
Entomologist and vice president of professional services
SureHarvest, sustainable agriculture
Title: "Sustainable Agriculture: What Is Happening Out on the Farm?"
Host: Michael Parrella, professor and chair of the Department of Entomology and Nematology
Wednesday, Nov. 5
Chuck Fox
Professor, University of Kentucky, specializing in ecology and evolution of life histories; insect-plant interactions; insect behavioral ecology
Title: "Inbreeding-Environment Interactions: Experimental Studies and a Meta Analysis"
Host: Jay Rosenheim, professor, Department of Entomology and Nematology
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
No seminar
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.
Contacts:
Steve Nadler, sanadler@ucdavis.edu
Professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Jesael "Jesa" David, jcdavid@ucdavis.edu
Student Affairs Officer, Graduate Programs
Plant Pathology, Entomology and Nematology
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Integrated management specialist Frank Zalom, president of the 7000-member Entomological Society of America (ESA), and a distinguished professor in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, will invite the attendees to the 62nd annual ESA meeting, to be held Nov. 16-19 in Portland, Ore. He will spotlight the events planned; the theme is “Grand Challenges Beyond Our Horizons.”
Chemical ecologist Walter Leal, professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and co-chair of the 2016 International Congress of Entomology (ICE 2016), will give two presentations at the opening ceremony: the plenary lecture and a talk on ICE 2016. He will invite the Brazilian Congress to attend ICE 2016, to be held Sept. 25-30, 2016 in Orlando, Fla. It promises to be the world's largest gathering entomologists.
Both Zalom and Leal are fellows of ESA.
ESA Vice President Phil Mulder, professor and head of the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at Oklahoma State University, will assist at the EntomoQuiz competition. Mulder has served as Gamesmaster for many years at ESA meetings. As an entomology student in the 1980s, he was one of the first to compete in the Linnaean Games.
ESA also will gift the Brazilian entomologists with buzzers, timers, and other equipment needed for the competition.
"The Brazilian Congresses of Entomology are some of the largest gatherings of entomologists in the world, and usually more than 50 percent of the delegates are students," said Pedro Neves, president of the Entomological Society of Brazil. "Therefore, we greatly appreciate the gift and help from ESA."
"ESA is proud to present Linnaean Games equipment to the Entomological Society of Brazil for their EntomoQuiz competition," said Zalom. "We hope that their games will be as fun and as successful as ours have been, and that they will carry on the tradition as we have for decades."
Also at the Brazilian meeting, Zalom will give a presentation on the North American invasion of the spotted wing drosophila, Drosophila suzukii, during a symposium on invasive insects.
Zalom, Mulder and ESA Past Presidents Rob Wiedenmann and Grayson Brown will participate at a joint meeting between the American and Brazilian entomological societies to discuss future projects and collaborations, including the identification of grand challenges for entomologists in the coming decade.
"This is one of the most important steps towards strengthening the relations between the two societies," said Antônio R. Panizzi, past president of the Brazilian society and moderator of the symposium.
(Editor's Note: Richard Levine of ESA contributed to this news release)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Mussen, who retired in June after 38 years of service, will speak from 8:45 to 9:45 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 18 in the University Center on “Changes in Beekeeping Over Three Decades.” Mussen is a five-time president of WAS, an organization he helped found in 1977. He joined the UC Davis faculty in 1976.
The conference will take place in conjunction with the 2nd International Workshop on Hive and Bee Management, Sept. 17-21 and the Missoula Honey Harvest Festival, Sept. 20. The first-ever harvest festival is scheduled to be an annual event.
Theme of the WAS conference is “The Path of Discovery to the Future.” The daylong programs are Sept. 18 and 19. The WAS president is Jerry Bromenshenk, a professor at the University of Montana who serves as the state director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (DOE EPSCoR).
Sept. 17 is the 2nd International Workshop on Hive and Bee Monitoring, sponsored by WAS and the Bee Culture magazine. Jerry Hayes will discuss Monsanto research and scale hives, and Dick Rogers, Bayer CropScience research and scale hives. Other topics include wide-scale scientific experiments that can be conducted by beekeepers; interpreting hive weight and temperature; and acoustic scanning of bee pests, diseases, pesticides, molecular genetics for queen production.
The Sept. 18 WAS agenda includes such topics as honey bee health in Canada. bees in Northern Ireland; bee health and treatments; critical issues for bees and beekeeping; and bees and bee breeding in New Zealand. One of the speakers is virologist Michelle Flenniken of Montana State University; the former Häagen-Dazs Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Davis. She will speak on "Honey Bee Virology and Diseases" from 11:15 to 11:45 a.m.
The Sept. 19 WAS agenda will include a keynote address, “Let Me Tell You About the Birds and the Bees: Neonic Pesticides and the Prospects for Future Life on Planet Earth” by G. Philip Hughes, of the White House Writers' Group. Other talks will be a presentation on “Working Bees” by Randy Oliver of Scientific Beekeeping; critical issues for bees and beekeepers; adapting bee management to climate change; and honey producers.
The Western Apicultural Society is a non-profit, educational, beekeeping organization founded in 1978 for the benefit and enjoyment of all beekeepers in western North America.
Membership is open worldwide. However, the organization was designed specifically to meet the educational needs of beekeepers from the states of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming; the provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and the Yukon; and the states of northern Mexico.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Yigen Chen and Steve Seybold continually trapped the reddish-brown insect, about a third of the size of a grain of rice, for three years along Putah Creek in Davis, Calif., and recorded its daily and seasonal flight behavior. They lured the insect into the traps with a synthetic version of its aggregation pheromone.
“We discovered the collective and interactive effects of four environmental factors on the crepuscular (twilight) flight behavior of the insect,” said lead author Chen, a research entomologist and project scientist with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. “We found that the optimal trapping conditions are a combination of moderate to warm temperatures, around 79 to 81 Fahrenheit; low light intensity; low wind speed, 0.6 to 2.5 miles per hour; and moderate barometric pressure, 755 to 757.”
“Understanding the walnut twig beetle's seasonal flight cycle and factors that govern its flight are critical first steps in the early detection of invasive species prior to implementing pest eradication or integrated pest management (IPM) programs,” they wrote in their research article, “Crepuscular Flight Activity of an Invasive Insect Governed by Interacting Abiotic Factors,”published in the Aug. 26 edition of the Public Library of Science, PLOS ONE.
However, when coupled with a hitchhiking fungus, Geosmithia morbida, it causes what is known as thousand cankers disease. The beetles create numerous galleries beneath the bark, resulting in fungal infection and canker formation. The large numbers of cankers led to the name, thousand cankers disease.
As the disease advances, the health of the tree declines and eventually it dies, sometimes within a three-year period, said Seybold, who has been studying the beetle and the newly discovered fungus with its barrel-shaped spores since 2008.
When male beetles initiate new galleries, they produce an aggregation pheromone. As the population increases, the flight response of males and females similarly increases.
Mating disruption or interruption of insect aggregation is crucial to controlling such insect pests as the walnut twig beetle in IPM programs, the entomologists pointed out. “Understanding the interactions among abiotic environmental factors on flight activity, should increase the efficacy of these methods in a specific IPM program to control the beetle,” Chen said.
“The primarily crepuscular flight activity had a Gaussian relationship with ambient temperature and barometric pressure but a negative exponential relationship with increasing light intensity and wind speed,” they wrote in their abstract. “A model selection procedure indicated that the four abiotic factors collectively and interactively governed P. juglandis diurnal flight.”
New knowledge of the primary periods of seasonal flight (May‒July and September‒October) “provides some guidance for when semiochemical-based interruption of aggregation may be applied most efficaciously,” they said..
Seybold, one of the first scientists to study the beetle and fungus in California, served on a scientific team that developed guidelines and trapping methods for the beetle. In 2010 and 2011, the team discovered and later patented the aggregation pheromone for the beetle and conducted scientific trials in northern California.
Late in the summer of 2011, the team demonstrated the efficacy of the pheromone as a flight trap bait. The bait lures both male and female beetles into a small plastic funnel trap.
The walnut twig beetle, native to the southwestern United States and Mexico, and widely distributed in Colorado, Arizona, California, and New Mexico, has now been detected throughout much of the United States: in nine western and five eastern states. In 2013, it was reported in northern Italy.
The earliest symptom of thousand cankers disease is yellowing foliage that progresses rapidly to brown wilted foliage, then finally branch mortality. Branch mortality and decline of the tree crown are one of three major symptoms of thousand cankers disease. The others are numerous small cankers on branches and the trunk, and holes and other evidence of tiny bark beetles.
Related links:
- Thousand Cankers Disease and the Walnut Twig Beetle in California (UC IPM)
- Walnut Twig Beetle (USDA Forest Service)
- Pest Alert, Walnut Twig Beetle and Thousand Cankers Disease (Colorado State University)
- Thousandcankers.com (This site is a collaborative effort between the Northeastern Area State and Private Forestry, the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station, the Purdue University Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, the Hardwood Tree Improvement and Regeneration Center, the American Walnut Manufacturers Association, and the Walnut Council.)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The distinction recognizes outstanding professors who have achieved the highest level of scholarship, in that they are globally recognized for their research and also known for their excellence in teaching. The UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology has four other distinguished professors: nematologist Howard Ferris and entomologists Bruce Hammock, Frank Zalom and Thomas Scott.
Carey, whose work spans four decades, is considered the world's foremost authority on insect demography; a worldwide authority on the demography and invasion biology of tephritid fruit flies, particularly the Mediterranean fruit fly; and a preeminent authority on biodemographics of human aging and lifespan. He is also a pioneering force advocating the educational use of digital video technology, work that he is sharing throughout much of the state, nation and the world.
For 10 years, Carey served as the principal investigator and director of the multidisciplinary, 11-institution, 20-scientist program “Biodemographic Determinants of Lifespan,” which received more than $10 million in funding from the NIH/NIA from 2003 to 2013.
Carey has published more than 200 scientific papers and three books on arthropod demography, including the monograph Longevity (Princeton, 2003) and the “go-to” book on insect demography, Demography for Biologists with Special Emphasis on Insects (Oxford, 1993). His landmark paper on “slowing of mortality at older ages,” published in Science in 1992 and cited more than 350 times, keys in on his seminal discovery that mortality slows at advanced ages. The UC Davis College of Agriculture and Environmental Science cited this as one of “100 Ways in Which Our College Has Shaped the World.”
In his quest for developing concepts for estimating the age structure of insect populations, Carey discovered a new analytical property of life tables--known in demographic circles as Carey's Equality--that the death distribution in a life table population equals its age structure. It is a unique property of the life table that connects it to a stationary population. Scientists consider the discovery remarkable for two reasons: first, that it was unknown despite the 150-year history of the life table, and second, that it was discovered by an entomologist and not by any of the thousands of mathematicians, demographers or actuaries that study and apply them.
His groundbreaking paper documenting medfly establishment in California (Science 1991) generated what scientists described as much-needed discussion within the entomological community about definitions of eradication, the concept of subdetectable levels of invasive pests, and the need for a paradigm shift in invasion biology of economically and medically important arthropod pests.
Carey also is known for his involvement with the light brown apple moth eradication in northern California, testifying to the California Legislature, California Assembly Agriculture Committee, California Senate Environmental Quality Committee, San Francisco Board of Supervisors, California Roundtable for Agriculture and the Environment, Senator Migden hearings, Nancy Pelosi staff meetings, and California Senate Committee on Food and Agriculture. For his work involving the light brown apple moth, Carey was named “Hero of the San Francisco Bay” in 2008 by the San Francisco Bay Guardian along with botanist Daniel Harder, executive director of the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum, and horticulturist Jeff Rosendale, who operates a nursery in Soquel.
Carey chaired the systemwide UC Committee on Research Policy and served on the system-wide UC Academic Council. He currently chairs the 2014-15 Education Technology subcommittee of UC Davis Campus Council for Information Technology (CCFIT), which provides advice and recommendations to key UC Davis administration on educational and information technology and its use at UC Davis in support of instruction, research, administration and public service/
Another highlight of his digital technology work is his key role as an advisor of the nine-university CARTA (Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa). He recently delivered presentations in two African counties on the use of the digital technology in research, teaching and outreach. He was the only invitee from the United States to participate in the workshops, one held in Nairobi, Kenya in March 2014 and the other in Kampala, Uganda in July 2014.
An innovative teacher and scientist, Carey this year received a UC Davis Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award and the C. W. Woodworth Award, the highest honor given by the Pacific Branch of the Entomological Society of America (ESA), for outstanding accomplishments in entomology.
In his teaching and/or digital technology projects, Carey
- Encourages students to learn through creative, innovative ways, such as the student-produced, instructor-directed video productions, “One Minute Entomologist” and “How to Make an Insect Collection (the latter won an award from the Entomological Society of America)
- Offers an innovative, online course, “Terrorism and War,” through the Science and Society program. It was selected one of 27 courses, UC systemwide, to receive grand support ($75,000) from UC Online.
- Served as the pioneering and driving force behind the UCTV Research Seminars; he began video-recording seminars in his department several years ago and then encouraged video-recording on all the other nine UC campuses.
- Partnered with Assistant Professor Sarah Perrault in the University Writing Program to produce a playlist of 13 videos, Write Like a Professor; The Research Term Paper.
- Designed and taught “Longevity,” a 4-credit course based on his research program in the biology and demography of aging (biodemography). He also created a kinship video.
In addition, Carey has presented more than 250 seminars in venues all over the world, from Stanford, Harvard, Moscow, Beijing to Athens, London, Adelaide and Okinawa. He serves as associate editor of three journals Experimental Gerontology, Demographic Research and Genus.
A former vice chair of the UC Davis Department, the distinguished professor is a senior scholar at the Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging at UC Berkeley, and a fellow of four professional societies across several disciplines: the Entomological Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Gerontological Society of America, and the California Academy of Sciences.
Carey received his bachelor's degree in animal ecology from Iowa State University; his master's degree in entomology from Iowa State University; and his doctorate in entomology from UC Berkeley. He joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty in 1980.