- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
DAVIS--Honey bee guru Eric Mussen, Extension apiculturist at the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology who will be retiring at the end of June, has seen and used many a smoker during his 38-year career.
But this one is different.
In honor of his service, the California State Beekeepers’ Association recently presented him with a plaque decorated with a smoker “for 38 years of work and support.”
Throughout his career, Mussen has offered advice to scores of people and figuratively put out many a fire involving beekeeping and pollination issues.
A smoker, a device that beekeepers use to calm honey bees so they can open their hives, masks the smell of the alarm pheromones released by guard bees. It also prompts the bees to gorge on honey.
Considered by his peers as one of the most respected and influential professional apiculturists in the nation, Mussen presented a slide show of some of the highlights of his career during his two-hour presentation on “The Most Interesting Time in Beekeeping.”
“I got carried away,” Mussen said later. “I was nearly at the end of the second hour when I was asked to wrap up my 45-minute presentation. Many listeners said that they still hope to hear the ‘more current’ portion that had to be omitted.”
Mussen has given presentations to CSBA since joining the UC Davis faculty in 1976. He is also the organization’s apiculturist and parliamentarian and served as a delegate to the American Beekeeping Federation.
A native of Schenectady, N.Y., Mussen received his bachelor’s degree in entomology from the University of Massachusetts (after turning down an offer to play football at Harvard) and then received his master’s degree and doctorate in entomology from the University of Minnesota in 1969 and 1975, respectively.
His doctoral research focused on the epidemiology of a viral disease of larval honey bees, sacbrood virus.
Mussen continues to tackle many new challenges regarding honey bee health and pollination concerns, including mites, diseases, pesticides, malnutrition, stress, Africanized honey bees and the successful pollination of California’s almond acreage.
Mussen educates the beekeeping industry and general public with his bimonthly newsletter, from the UC Apiaries, which he launched in 1976. Since 1976, he has also written Bee Briefs, addressing such issues as diseases, pesticides and swarms. Both publications are on the departmental website at http://ucanr.org/sites/entomology/Faculty/Eric_C_Mussen/Apiculture_Newsletter/.
The recipient of numerous state and national awards, Mussen is a worldwide authority on honey bees, said Jackie Park-Burris, a commercial queen breeder in Butte County and a past president of the California State Apiary Board.
Mussen is known for devoting his research and extension activities toward the improvement of honey bee health and honey bee colony management practices. He helps growers, consumers, UC Farm Advisors, agricultural commissioners, scientists, beekeepers, researchers, pesticide regulators, 4-H’ers, and state and national agricultural and apicultural organizations, among others.
"I am basically all pro-bee,” Mussen told the American Bee Journal in a two-part feature story published in the September of 2011. “Whatever I can do for bees, I do it...It doesn’t matter whether there is one hive in the backyard or 15,000 colonies. Bees are bees and the bees’ needs are the bees’ needs.”
Recruitment is underway for his successor, who will begin as an Extension assistant apiculturist.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
DAVIS--Ecologist Rick Karban, professor in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, is featured in the Dec. 23-30 edition of The New Yorker in Michael Pollan’s piece, “The Intelligent Plant: Scientists Debate a New Way of Understanding Plants.”
Karban studies volatile (chemical) communication between plants that affect their defenses against herbivores. Pollan wrote that he met Karban in Vancouver, British Columbia, last July when Karban was presenting a paper on “Plant Communication and Kin Recognition in Sagebrush” at the sixth annual meeting of Society for Plant Neurobiology, now the Society for Plant Signalling and Behavior.
For The New Yorker feature, Pollan interviewed scientists on a number of plant intelligence topics, including decision-making. “Plants perceive competitors and grow away from them,” Karban told Pollan. “They are more leery of actual vegetation than they are of inanimate objects, and they respond to potential competitors before actually being shaded by them.”
Pollan wrote that “Plants speak in a chemical vocabulary we can’t directly perceive or comprehend. The first important discoveries in plant communication were made in the lab in the nineteen-eighties, by isolating plants and their chemical emissions in Plexiglas chambers, but Rick Karban, the U.C. Davis ecologist, and others have set themselves the messier task of studying how plants exchange chemical signals outdoors, in a natural setting.”
Pollan toured Karban’s sagebrush study plot at the UC Sagehen Creek Field Station, near Truckee. Karban has been researching the plant/herbivore interactions since 1999.
Karban recently drew widespread scientific and media attention with research that he and four colleagues published in February 2013 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Their research showed that kin have
distinct advantages when it comes to plant communication, just as “the ability of many animals to recognize kin has allowed them to evolve diverse cooperative behaviors,” he said in a news release published by the UC Davis Department
of Entomology and Nematology.
“When sagebrush plants are damaged by their herbivores, they emit volatiles that cause their neighbors to adjust their defenses,” Karban said in the news release. “These adjustments reduce rates of damage and increase growth and survival of the neighbors.”
“Why would plants emit these volatiles which become public information?” he asked. “Our results indicate that the volatile cues are not completely public, that related individuals responded more effectively to the volatiles than did strangers. This bias makes it less likely that emitters will aid strangers and more likely that receivers will respond to relatives.”
The research, “Kin Recognition Affects Plant Communication and Defense,” was co-authored by two scientists from Japan and two from UC Davis: Kaori Shiojiri of the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University, and Satomi Ishizaki of the Graduate School of Science and Technology, Niigata University; and William Wetzel of the UC Davis Center for Population Biology, and Richard Evans of the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences.
To simulate predator damage, the researchers “wounded” the plants by clipping them and then studied the responses to the volatile cues. They found that the plants that received cues from experimentally clipped close relatives experienced less leaf damage over the growing season that those that received cues from clipped neighbors that were more
distantly related.
“More effective defense adds to a growing list of favorable consequences of kin recognition for plants,” they wrote.
Karban is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and has published more than 100 journal articles and two books.
Links:
Kin Recognition Affects Plant Communication and Defense
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The exhibition includes bronze stick insects and a series of digital prints of colorful cockroaches.
The opening reception will be from 5 to 7 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 24. Shelomi will be there to answer questions. The gallery is located in the South Silo building.
Shelomi, who studies with major professor Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology at UC Davis, has volunteered at the Craft Center since his graduate school enrollment at UC Davis in the fall of 2009. He has taken many of the evening and weekend classes offered there, from flame-working to wood-turning to bookbinding.
The most popular items are his bronze stick insects. Shelomi’s dissertation is on the digestive physiology of stick insects (Phasmatodea), for which he uses the many phasmids reared at the Bohart Museum for research and for public display.
How does he make the bronze replicas?
When a stick insect dies (of natural causes), Shelomi takes the hard exoskeleton to the Craft Center, mounts it with wax channels called “sprues,” and embeds it in plaster. He then heats the combination in a kiln until all organic matter, including the insect, is burned away, leaving a plaster mold with a cavity in the shape of a stick insect.
Shelomi then pours the molten metal, such as bronze or pewter, into the mold using a spin-caster machine. Each mold can be used only once, but the result is a metal copy of the insect with most of the details, from the spines to the delicate mouthparts, fully preserved.
Another display in the exhibition is a series of digital prints of colorful cockroaches, from pinks to greens to blues. These were made by injecting some of the feeder cockroaches used in the Bohart Museum with histological dyes, a process known as “vital staining” that played a big role in Shelomi’s dissertation research. Each stain colors different tissues of the insect with different intensities, and can be used to identify anatomical features.
Other pieces include relief prints of cicadas, ceramic ants, and an oil painting of a Carabid beetle, as well as several works that are not entomology inspired, but showcase “the variety of media and materials one can work with at the Craft Center,” Shelomi said.
Some of the pieces at Shelomi’s solo exhibition will be available for purchase after the show. For more information, contact Matan Shelomi at mshelomi@ucdavis.edu.
Shelomi, active in entomological circles, received the 2013 John Henry Comtock Award from the Pacific Branch of the Entomological Society of America (ESA) and was a member of the UC Davis debate team that won the national 2013 ESA Student Debate championship. He regularly answers entomological questions on Quora.
The Craft Center, which offers more than 90 classes each quarter, is open on Thursdays from 12:30 to 10 p.m.; on Fridays from 12:30 to 7 p.m.; and on Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. More information on the craft center is available on the website.
Related Links:
- Matan Shelomi and the Stick Insects
- Matan Shelomi's Shorty Award
- Cutting Bergmann's Rule Down to Size
- Taking a Poke at Pokemon
- NSF Grant
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
DAVIS--Neil Tsutsui, associate professor, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley, will focus on Argentine ants when he speaks on "Integrating Chemical Ecology and Genetics to Illuminate the Behavior of an Invasive Social Insect," at his seminar on Wednesday, Jan. 8, hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
The seminar, the first of the winter quarter, is from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in 122 Briggs. Host is Brian Johnson, assistant professor and coordinator of the winter quarter seminars. Plans call for video-recording the seminar for later posting on UCTV.
“Some of the most damaging invasive species are social insects, and the Argentine ant ranks as one of the most widespread and abundant,” Tsutsui says in his abstract. “As is true for social insects generally, many of the key behaviors and biological processes that underlie the success of Argentine ants are regulated by sophisticated chemical signaling.”
“In recent years, my lab group has been investigating the identity, production, and perception of these chemical signals using tools from chemical ecology, genomics, and functional genetics. Our research has produced insights into how these ants coordinate their behavior, reproduction, and foraging, and suggests potential new methods for their control."
On his website, Tsutsui says: “The research in our lab focuses on ants and bees--how they communicate, why they behave the ways they do, their ecology, and their evolution. We work in both the field and the lab, using a variety of different approaches.”
Tsutsui joined the UC Berkeley faculty in July 2007. He earlier was an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC San Diego. He received his bachelor’s degree in biology, specializing in marine science, from Boston University in 1995, and his doctorate in biology from UC San Diego in 2000.
Winter Seminars:
List of winter quarter speakers
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The seminars will take place on Wednesdays from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in 122 Briggs. Plans are to record each seminar for later posting on UCTV.
The speakers' titles and abstracts will be announced later.
The seminar speakers:
Jan. 8
Neil Tsutsui, associate professor, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley
Title: "Integrating Chemical Ecology and Genetics to Illuminate the Behavior of an Invasive Social Insect"
Host: Brian Johnson, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Jan. 15
Dave Gillespie, research scientist, Pacific Agri-Food Research Center, Agassiz, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Title: "Biological Control in the Face of Climate Change"
Host: Michael Parrella, professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Jan. 22
David Holway, professor, Section of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution, UC San Diego
Title: "Do Positive Species Interactions Promote Invasions? The Role of Ant-Hemipteran Mutualisms in Ant Invasions"
Host: Brian Johnson, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Steve Naranjo, Center director and entomologist of the Arid-Land Agricultural Research Center, USDA-ARS (Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture)
Title: "Biological Control and the Transformation of Cotton IPM"
Feb. 5
Kenneth Ross, professor, Department of Entomology, University of Georgia
Title: "The Natural (and Unnatural) History of the Red Imported Fire Ant"
Host: Greg Lanzaro, professor, Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine
Feb. 12
Alana Jacobson, Department of Entomology, North Carolina State University
Title: "Investigating Factors Underlying Thrips-Topovirus Interactions: the Importance of Thrips Genetic Variation in the Transmission of Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus by Thrips tabaci and Its Relevance to Other Tospovirus Vectors."
Host: Diane Ullman, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Academic Programs at the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Feb. 19
Kelly Hamby, doctoral candidate studying with major professor Frank Zalom, professor of entomology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Title: "Biology and Pest Management of Drosophila suzukii in California Berries and Small Fruits"
Host: Frank Zalom, IPM specialist and professor of entomology
Feb. 26
David Hughes, assistant professor, Entomology, Millenium Science Complex, University Park, Penn.
Title: "Zombie Ants: the Precise Manipulation of Animal Behavior by a Microbe"
Host: Joanna Chiu, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
March 5
Matan Shelomi, doctoral candidate studying with major professor Lynn Kimsey, Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology at UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Title: "Digestive Physiology of the Phasmatodea"
March 12
Nazzy Pakpour, postdoctoral scholar, Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, UC Davis School of Medicine
Title: "The Effects of Ingested Human Insulin on Malaria Transmission"