- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, a half-acre, bee-friendly garden planted in the fall of 2009 next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road, UC Davis, is, in one word—spectacular.
Featuring a series of interconnected gardens with names like “Honeycomb Hideout,” “Nectar Nook” and “Pollinator Patch,” the garden provides the Laidlaw honey bees with a year-around food source, raises public awareness about the plight of honey bees, encourages visitors to plant bee-friendly gardens of their own, and serves as a research site.
Through its parent company Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream, Häagen-Dazs has gifted or pledged a total of $252,000 to the garden.
It's a gift to the UC Davis Department of Entomology but it's more than that. “It's a gift to the campus, the community and the honey bees and other pollinators that visit it,” said Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen of the entomology faculty.
“This garden is a living laboratory to educate, inspire and engage people of all ages in the serious work of helping to save honey bees,” said Dori Bailey, director of Haagen-Dazs Consumer Communications.
It offers bees and other pollinators “a place to thrive,” Bailey said, and “it contributes to finding answers that enable us to be better stewards of these tiny pollinators.”
The design? It's the brainchild of Sausalito-area landscape architects Donald Sibbett and Ann F. Baker; interpretative planner Jessica Brainard; and exhibit designer Chika Kurotaki, who teamed to win the international design competition.
Entomology professor Lynn Kimsey, who chaired the department in 2009 and helped judge the design competition, calls the haven “a campus destination.”
“It's the place to go, the place to be,” she said.
Depending on the season, the garden flourishes with fruits, vegetables, nuts and ornamentals, including almond, plum, apple, pomegranate, persimmon, strawberries, blueberries, watermelon, artichokes, onions, salvias, lavenders and daisies. All are labeled by common name and scientific name, in a project spearheaded by Melissa “Missy” Borel, program manager of the California Urban Center for Horticulture, who oversaw the development of the garden
Art graces the garden, thanks to the UC Davis Art/Science Fusion Program, founded and directed by entomologist-artist Diane Ullman and Davis-based artist Donna Billick. Billick sculpted the six-foot-long worker bee that anchors the haven. Students and area residents crafted the bee-motif ceramic tiles that line a bench, which also includes the names of major donors. The nearby shed is walled with ceramic tiles of native bees.
Volunteers from the Davis community tend the garden every Friday morning. Faculty, staff and students lead tours.
For native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology, the garden is a research site. He is monitoring the bee species foraging in the garden. “Just over 40 species of bees were found the first year since the garden was planted,” he said. “About half of these were new to the area based on my survey the year prior to planting. As the garden matures and perhaps some new plants are added, I expect the diversity of bees using it to increase.”
The garden is also global in nature. Due in part to Häagen-Dazs web-based marketing, more than 600 donors around the world have contributed more than $70,000 to support honey bee research. In all, what Häagen-Dazs has given to the UC Davis bee biology program exceeds $350,000—this includes funding for the Häagen-Dazs Postdoctoral Scholar and other projects.
The Bee Haven came to "bee" after officials at the Haagen-Dazs read a research news story on honey bees, written by communication specialist Kathy Keatley Garvey and telephoned her. The article, on "building a better bee," chronicled the plight of honey bees and the work of bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey, then manager of the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility and now with Washington State University. Haagen-Dazs served as the primary donor of the garden and also funded the Häagen-Dazs Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Davis. It went to Michelle Flenniken, an insect virus researcher based at UC San Francisco. She is now a professor at Montana State University.
The design blueprint can be downloaded at http://beebiology.ucdavis.edu/HAVEN/honeybeehaven.html
Links:
Sausalito Team Wins Design Competition
http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=15240
Grand Opening Celebration of Honey Bee Garden
http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=15249
Eagle Scout Project: Fence Around the Bee Garden
http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=10166
Campus Buzzway: Wildflowers
http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=15242
Haagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven: Sacramento Bee Award
(With photo of founding volunteers)
http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=10205
Shedding Light on Native Bees
https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=27570
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The study is especially significant because of the desperate shortage of livers among thousands of very ill patients, said lead researcher Dipak Panigrahy of Harvard Medical School, in work published online in the July 29th edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
According to the American Liver Foundation website, 1,848 patients died in 2005 while waiting for a donated liver to become available. “Currently, about 17,000 adults and children have been medically approved for liver transplants and are waiting for donated livers to become available. The waiting list grows every year.”
The researchers found that a natural substance in blood vessels stimulates organ and tissue regeneration.
The 28-member team discovered that “systemic administration of EETs significantly increased liver and lung regeneration by 23 percent to 46 percent when compared to control mice post partial liver resection,” Panigrahy said.
“This can be very useful in transplant both for the donor and the recipient in getting full function back with liver transplant,” said researcher and co-author Bruce Hammock, a distinguished professor of entomology with a joint appointment at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.
In addition to liver transplants, “the research could lead to the success of other organ transplants and speed the recovery of both the patient and the donor,” Hammock said. It could also be a boon for other wound-healing procedures “where tissue repair and growth are crucial.”
“We are planning to evaluate EETs and soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH) inhibitors in humans who need tissue regeneration such as organ regeneration and wound healing,” Panigraphy said. “We are working to evaluate soluble epoxide hydrolase inhibitors in humans by surgeons.” The surgeons include Mark Puder, Boston Children’s Hospital, lung regeneration; and Roger Jenkins of the Lahey Clinic, Boston, who performed New England's first successful liver transplant in July 1983. In addition, they plan to work with other clinicians for testing EETs in stimulating wound healing in diabetic and nondiabetic patients.
Panigrahy, noting the chronic shortage of livers for transplant, said that liver surgeons “urgently need novel ways to regenerate livers. With Bruce (Hammock) we are working with Dr. Roger Jenkins, who performed New England's first successful liver transplant in July 1983.”
The research, titled “Epoxyeicosanoids Promote Organ and Tissue Regeneration” and accomplished with animal models, showed acceleration of liver regeneration, kidney compensatory growth, lung compensatory growth, wound healing, corneal neovascularization, and retinal vascularization. Vascularization deals with blood vessel formation in abnormal tissue or in abnormal positions.
“There is a soluble epoxide hydrolase with investigational new drug status with the FDA that stabilizes these natural regulators and we could use them for compassionate trials in this area,” Hammock said. “One possible trial, with Mark Puder at Harvard, is for correcting a condition that blocks growth of lungs in newborns. We have a chance to dramatically increase the number of these babies that survive.”
“We are working on this fatal disease of newborns termed diaphramic hernia,” added Panigrahy. “So far this is all in experimental animals but we are planning to test if increasing EETs can be successful in encouraging poorly developed lungs of newborns to grow."
In their abstract, they wrote: “…we hypothesize that endothelial cells stimulate organ and tissue regeneration via production of bioactive EETs. To determine whether endothelial-derived EETs affect physiologic tissue growth in vivo, we used genetic and pharmacological tools to manipulate endogenous EET levels. We show that endothelial-derived EETs play a critical role in accelerating tissue growth in vivo, including liver regeneration, kidney compensatory growth, lung compensatory growth, wound healing, corneal neovascularization, and retinal vascularization. Administration of synthetic EETs recapitulated these results, whereas lowering EET levels, either genetically or pharmacologically, delayed tissue regeneration, demonstrating that pharmacological modulation of EETs can affect normal organ and tissue growth. We also show that soluble epoxide hydrolase inhibitors, which elevate endogenous EET levels, promote liver and lung regeneration. Thus, our observations indicate a central role for EETs in organ and tissue regeneration and their contribution to tissue homeostasis.
Among the co-researchers are Jun Yang and Bora Inceoglu of the Hammock lab.
“We are very excited about these findings,” Inceoglu said. “Traditionally wound repair and healing is an area where we clearly lack efficacious drugs. This work demonstrates that there are natural processes one can augment and promote to accelerate wound healing. This is a hopeful moment for many patients suffering from serious conditions that can be helped with these new drugs."
Said Yang: “The finding here implies the modulation of EETs in vivo might help wound healing especially for the organ transplant patients. In the study, the result based on liver transplant patients supports this argument, which is very exciting and provides the basis for the translation to the clinic."
Hammock, who directs the NIEHS Superfund Research Program on the UC Davis campus, received financial support from Superfund Program and from NIH grants. He also receives financial backing as a George and Judy Marcus Senior Fellow of the American Asthma Foundation.
Other funding sources supporting the 28-member team were the National Cancer Institute Grant, the Stop and Shop Pediatric Brain Tumor Fund, the C. J. Buckley Pediatric Brain Tumor Fund, the Joshua Ryan Rappaport Fellowship, the Children’s Hospital Boston Surgical Foundation and the Vascular Biology Program, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Fellowship, and the Intramural Research Program of NIH.
Panigrahy cautioned that the work is a work in progress. “Further studies are needed to carefully evaluate the benefits as well as the risks in the clinical modulation of these lipid mediators,” said Panigrahy. “EETs are a substance that can potentially link wound healing and cancer. Stimulating of EETs promotes wound healing. We have shown the ability of EET antagonists to inhibit tumor growth and metastasis. These results could pave the way for a new strategy for the prevention and treatment of metastatic disease — that is, inhibition of EET bioactivity. Specific EET antagonists, inhibitors of endothelial CYP epoxygenases, or the overexpression of EET-metabolizing enzymes may represent new strategies for the treatment of angiogenic diseases, including cancer.”
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Carroll co-authored the 13-page article, “Adaptive Versus Non-Adaptive Phenotypic Plasticity and the Potential for Contemporary Adaptation in New Environments,” published in April 2007 (Volume 21) in the British Ecological Society’s journal, Functional Ecology.
C. K. Ghalambor of Colorado State University served as the lead author. Other researchers contributing, in addition to Carroll, were J. K. McKay of Colorado State University and D. N. Reznick of UC Riverside.
The society, founded in 1913, published the list as part of its 100th anniversary celebrated this year. The work is the only selection in the field of evolutionary ecology. All listings are organized by subdiscipline.
Journal editor/reviewer Fernando Valladares, an ecologist in Madrid, Spain, wrote: “The capacity of organisms to accommodate their form and function to changing environments is called phenotypic plasticity, a concept not well integrated into the Neo-Darwinian synthesis but gaining increasing recognition and interest. Phenotypic plasticity is at the core of rapidly expanding areas such as epigenetics and has become a key concept in understanding species responses to global change. An implicit assumption in many studies is that a plastic phenotypic change is beneficial, i.e. increases fitness of the individual organism capable of such adjustment or change in response to the environment. However, as Ghalambor et al. remind us, plasticity can be not only positive, but neutral and even negative for fitness. The paper makes a sound contribution to the situations where plasticity is adaptive, and revises scenarios where plasticity prevents or allows evolution by directional selection. The explicit recognition of the frequent case that plastic adjustments do not lead to perfectly optimal phenotypes is one of the several merits of this revision, in addition to the brilliant explanation of when plasticity is or can be adaptive. The paper has significant limitations, e.g. in not emphasizing that what is maladaptive today could be adaptive tomorrow, but reading it remains an inspiring experience.”
Based in professor Sharon Lawler’s lab, Carroll directs the Institute for Contemporary Evolution and does research on patterns of ongoing evolution in wild and anthropogenic environments. He is well-known for his studies on evolutionary changes in soapberry bugs in response to plant introductions. He is also an expert on behavioral and evolutionary aspects of adaptation to contemporary environmental change in insects and other organisms.
Carroll is the co-editor of the book, Conservation Biology: Evolution in Action (Oxford University Press, 2008) with Charles Fox, professor of insect genetics, behavior and evolutionary ecology, University of Kentucky.
The British Ecological Society, under the banner of “Advancing Ecology and Making it Count,” publishes and disseminates high-quality ecological research in a variety of different formats, including its five world-renowned journals, two prestigious book series and informative member bulletin.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Native to Southeast Asia, Drosophilia suzukii infests soft-skinned fruits such as strawberries, raspberries, cherries, blueberries and blackberries. The insect was first detected in the United States in 2008 when scientists identified it in the central coastal region of California. It can cause an estimated $300 million in damage annually to California crops.
In pioneering research, the four-member team from the Department of Entomology and Nematology sought to find out the pest’s response to insecticide toxicity and whether it could be predicted through the integration of circadian activity and gene expression profiles.
“It is possible that if insecticides can be applied at the time when the SWD's defense system against insecticides is at its weakest state, they will be more effective,” Chiu said. “Results from our experiments turned out to be a bit more complicated than we originally envisioned, but we indeed found that at least for malathion, there is an optimal time for application to inflict maximum damage to SWD. We hope that growers will be able to use fewer insecticides, thereby decreasing damage to the environment and decreasing costs at the same time.”
“We caution growers that we still need to conduct field trials to confirm our laboratory observations,” Chiu addedf.
“SWD is becoming a big problem for growers of soft-skinned fruits such as strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and cherries all over the world,” Chiu pointed out. “With the need to satisfy insect damage standards and to reduce crop loss, the growers generally adopt high levels of insecticide usage for SWD control and risk reduction. In the long-term, this will lead to development of insecticide resistance, not to mention the damage inflicted on beneficial insects.”
“Current Drosophila suzukii management strategies rely heavily on insecticide usage, because other pest management tactics are still being development and optimized,” wrote Chiu and fellow authors Frank Zalom, integrated pest management specialist and professor of entomology; doctoral candidate Kelly Hamby of the Zalom lab; and graduate student Rosanna Kwok of the Chiu lab.
Said Hamby: “The paper is a first look at Drosophilia suzukii daily activity rhythms under a temperature and light/dark cycle mimicking California raspberry growing conditions as well as a look at the daily cycling of insecticide susceptibility enzymes that could potentially detoxify insecticides. The next steps would be to include more temperature conditions, more insecticides, and attempt an experiment in the field.”
"For me, the importance of our research is that it allows us to move toward a more effective and efficient way of controlling this pest, which is rapidly becoming of prominent importance because of how fast Drosophila suzukii has been spreading throughout the western US since its initial introduction," said Kwok. "By recognizing temporal differences that may contribute to a difference in toxicity to certain pesticides, we may be able to move toward management programs that are tailored to target a specific species of insect. We may be able to spray less or less frequently if we can find out when these pests are most susceptible."
"As for the future," Kwok added, "I think that as we sequence and fully annotate the D. suzukii genome we can identify more genes that are implicated in toxicity and pesticide resistance."
Chiu praised the work of the graduate students. "I think Kelly and Rosanna really did a fantastic job on this project!" she said.
The study took place under laboratory conditions simulating summer and winter in Watsonville. The team found significant differences in the chronotoxicity of SWD toward malathion, with the highest susceptibility at 6 a.m., “corresponding to peak expression of cytochrome P450s that may be involved in bioactivation of malathion,” they wrote in their abstract. “Chronobiology and chronotoxicity of D. suzukii provide valuable insights for monitoring and control efforts, because insect activity as well as insecticide timing and efficacy are crucial considerations for pest management.”
The spotted-wing drosophila was first observed in Japan as early as 1916. The females lay their eggs in ripe and ripening fruit, unlike other Drosophila species known to infest overripe and blemished fruit. The larvae feed on the fruit. “The adult is the only stage that can be targeted for control by conventional pesticides,” the UC Davis scientists wrote. The most commonly used insecticides are organophosphates, pyrethroids and spinosyns.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The research, involving 900 butterfly and moth species and 459 non-native plants in Europe, may lead to better screening of potential invasive plants, risk assessment, and pest management strategies, said researchers Ian Pearse and Florian Altermatt.
“Despite the growing prevalence of non-native plants, there are few effective tools for predicting the fate of non-native plants or their impacts on native communities,” they wrote in newly published research, “Predicting Novel Trophic Interactions in a Non-Native World,” in Ecology Letters. “We demonstrated that novel interactions between herbivores and non-native plants can be predicted based on plant evolutionary relationships and properties in the native herbivore-plant food web.”
“My work has asked why some non-native plants are attacked by native herbivores while others are not,” said Pearse, who completed the research while studying for his doctorate degree in entomology at UC Davis. He teamed with Altermatt, then a UC Davis postdoctoral scholar with UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy. Pearse is now a postdoctoral researcher in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and Altermatt is with the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology in Zurich, Switzerland.
“We noticed that many non-native plants were included as hosts of native moths in that food web,” Pearse said, “and we thought that we could use some of the ideas that I had been working on to explain which moths have started to eat which non-native plants.”
“Herbivores, by in large, are not very adventurous in what they eat,” Pearse said. “So, when a non-native plant enters their habitat, they tend to colonize those that are similar to the ones that they already eat. Plant evolutionary relationships are one of the best ways of looking at similarity between plants.”
They successfully predicted the majority of novel interactions between herbivores and non-native plants. “When non-native plants enter a new ecosystem, their success and effects are mostly unpredictable,” Pearse said. “However, we showed that one very predictable aspect of a non-native plant is which native herbivores can colonize it.”
For instance, the larvae of the cinnabar moth (family Tyriajacobaeae), are a biocontrol agent of ragworts (Senecio), a native of Europe, but they also will colonize other plants. A geometrid moth, Eupithecia virganreata feeds on various ragworts but over the last decades, has extended its diet to invasive goldenrods (Solidago canadensis and S. gigantea).
On the basis of interactions between native hosts and insects, the researchers found “specific diet extensions of potential European pest insects to plants of forestry or agricultural interest introduced from North America, as well as the diet extension of European insects onto non-native plants that are of invasive concern.”
“The goal of this approach is to correctly identify specific important interactions between a novel plant and native herbivore with the lowest possible false-positive rate, where a null model would result in a 50% false-positive rate,” they wrote. “For example, we predicted that the tussock moth (Calliteara pudibunda) colonizes red oak (Quercus rubra; a common introduced tree throughout Europe) with a false-positive rate of only 0.7%. The tussock moth is an herbivorous insect of forestry concerns, having mass-outbreaks, and it is thus critical to understand its diet extension to novel host plants. Similarly, we predicted that the specialist Sessiid moth Synanthedon tipuliformis colonizes Ribes aureum, a cultivated gooseberry introduced from North America, with a false-positive rate of only 2.0%. S. tipuliformis is known to cause damage in agricultural gooseberry plantations, and an accurate prediction of host switch to introduced agricultural gooseberries is thus economically important.”
Pearse received his doctorate in entomology from UC Davis in 2011, studying with major professor Rick Karban. Pearse's current research at Cornell “is trying to understand masting in oak trees; that is why and how trees produce very large seed sets in some years but small ones in others.”