April 18, 2013
The meeting will begin at 9:15 a.m. with registration for club members and guests, and conclude at approximately 2:30 p.m. The group, which meets three times a year, is comprised of university faculty, researchers, pest abatement professionals, students and other interested persons.
Shapiro will lead off the program at 9:45 a.m. with his talk on “History of the Sacramento Valley Butterfly Fauna.”
Chemical ecologist Steve Seybold of the USDA Forest Service, Davis, and an affiliate of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, will speak on “Goldspotted Oak Borer in California” at 10:30 a.m.
Steve Whitesides of Marrone Bio Innovations, Davis, will discuss “Grandevo and Venerate and their Role in California IPM Programs” at 11:15 a.m.
At 1:45 p.m., Stephen Brown, CDFA, and Anthony Jackson, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), USDA, will discuss “California and Federal Regulations Concerning Importing Living Plant Pests.”
The society meets three times a year: the first Thursday of February at the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), Sacramento; the first Thursday of May, at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, UC Davis; and the first Thursday of November in the Contra Costa Mosquito and Vector Control District conference room, Concord.
Membership is open to the public; dues are $10 year. President is Robert Dowell, a staff environmental scientist at CDFA.
Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen of the UC Davis Department of Entomology Faculty serves as the society’s treasurer and is taking luncheon reservations. Catering the box lunches will be Noah’s New York Bagels, Davis. (See link for choices and directions.) Mussen can be contacted at ecmussen@ucdavis.edu or by phone at (530) 752-0472.
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
April 17, 2013
The UC Davis Department of Entomology is planning lots of "bug" activities as its part of the 99th annual campuswide UC Davis Picnic Day celebration. Entomological events will take place from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday, April 20 at Briggs Hall, off Kleiber Hall Drive, and the Bohart Museum of Entomology, located in Room 1124 of Academic Surge on Crocker Lane.
Forensic entomologist Robert Kimsey is the coordinator of the department’s Picnic Day activities. Students (graduate or undergraduate) working with him are Danny Kilddich, Ivana Li, Nic McMurray, Danielle Wishon and Scott McCluen.
The Bohart Museum, home of nearly eight million insect specimens, will feature wasp nests in its new display case. These are nests once occupied by European paper wasps, yellow jackets, carpenter bees and bumble bees.
The Bohart also will include a live “petting zoo” where visitors can hold Madagascar hissing cockroaches, a rose-haired tarantula, and walking sticks.
At Briggs, the popular events will include Maggot Art, termite trails, cockroach races and honey tasting, as well as displays featuring forensic, medical, aquatic, apiculture and forest entomology. Exhibits also will include such topics as fly fishing/fly-tying, insect pests of ornamentals, and pollinators of California.
Mussen, who has been coordinating the honey tasting for more than 30 years, said that this year the honeys are fairly similar in color but not in flavor. “Many people have asked what almond blossom honey tastes like—now they can find out. It leaves a fairly strong after-taste."
Visitors to Briggs can cheer for their favorite cockroach at the American cockroach races; watch a termite follow a line drawn with a Bic ink pen (they follow the line because the ink acts as a pheromone or attractant) and create a maggot art painting suitable for framing. And they can also purchase "bug" T-shirts and get their face painted.
The UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program (UC IPM) will provide a display in front of Briggs Hall. Visitors can learn about managing pests in their homes and garden, according to Mary Louise Flint, the UC IPM's associate director of urban and community IPM and an Extension entomologist with the UC Davis Department of Entomology. In addition, live lady beetles (aka ladybugs) will be distributed to children.
Plans also call for a “Bug Doctor” to answer insect-related questions from the public. Last year’s “Bug Doctors” included Michael Parrella, professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology.
Room 158 of Briggs will be transformed into fly-tying/fly fishing displays and aquatic entomology exhibits. Visitors will see approximately 10 insect drawers of mounted insects with fly-tying counterparts.
Room 122 of Briggs will include:
Honey Bees: The Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility will display a bee observation hive, and beekeeping equipment such as bee boxes, frames, veils and smokers.
Ants: The Phil Ward lab will put together displays on the incredible diversity of ants.
Forensic Entomology: "Dr. Death" (forensic entomologist Robert Kimsey) will offer a show-and-tell of methods used in forensic entomology.
Aquatic Entomology: Professor Sharon Lawler will display aquatic insects and she and her lab will answer questions about them.
Forest Insects: Graduate student Stacy Hishinuma and forest entomologist Steve Seybold, a chemical ecologist with the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station, Davis, and an affiliate of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, are scheduled to show forest insects.
Mosquitoes: Medical entomology graduate students will set up displays about diseases vectored by mosquitoes and other insects. The Sacramento-Yolo Mosquito and Vector Control District will provide an educational exhibit about mosquito abatement.
(Editor's Note: The Honey and Pollination Center at the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science will host Picnic Day from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Free honey tastings, arts and crafts for kids, and more. Download flier.)
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
April 17, 2013
The seminar will take place from 12:05 to 1 p.m. in Room 1022 of the Life Sciences Addition, corner of Hutchison and Kleiber Hall drives. Assistant professor Neal Williams will host him.
“Bumble bees are major contributors to pollination of crops and wildflowers throughout the temperate northern hemisphere,” Goulson said. “any species have declined, contributing to fears that we might face a 'pollination crisis.' I will discuss the main causes of their declines, which probably vary between regions. In Europe, the primary driver is thought to be habitat loss and other changes associated with intensive farming. In the Americas, declines of some species are likely to be due to impacts of non-native diseases.
“I will then turn to possible links between poor bee health and pesticides, particularly a class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids. A controversy is currently raging on both sides of the Atlantic; I will give my view on the evidence for environmental impacts of these pesticides.”
Goulson received his bachelor’s degree in biology from Oxford University, followed by a doctorate on butterfly ecology at Oxford Brookes University. Subsequently, he lectured in biology for 11 years at the University of Southampton, before moving to Stirling in 2006, and then to Sussex in 2013.
Goulson works mainly on the ecology and conservation of bumble bees. He has published more than 200 scientific articles on the ecology and conservation of insects, with a particular focus on bumblebees. He is the author of Bumblebees; Their Behaviour, Ecology and Conservation, published in 2010 by Oxford University Press, and of A Sting in the Tale, a popular science book about bumble bees, published in 2013 by Jonathan Cape.
Goulson founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust in 2006, a charity which has grown to 8,000 members.
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
April 15, 2013
Shelomi, who studies with major professor Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology, received the award at the PBESA meeting on April 9 at South Lake Tahoe.
Shelomi will be one of six John Henry Comstock Award recipients, one from each ESA branch, to be honored at the ESA annual meeting, Nov. 10-13 in Austin, Texas. Each winner receives an all-expenses paid trip to the annual meeting, a $100 cash prize, and a certificate.
Kimsey described Shelomi, an insect physiologist, as “an incredibly outstanding doctoral candidate in entomology.” Shelomi graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University in 2009 and then joined the UC Davis graduate student program.
Matan is seeking a doctorate in entomology with a designated emphasis in organism-environment interactions. He maintains a perfect 4.0 grade point average. His current research deals with the anatomy, microbiology, and enzymology of the Phasmatodea (walking sticks) digestive system; with side interests including delusional infestations and forensic entomology. In his research on the digestive system, he is looking for bacteria or fungi that can break down cellulose in leaves, or the toxic compounds in Eucalyptus for walking sticks that feed on them.
Kimsey said that Shelomi excels in academics, research, publications, student activities, professional activities, presentations, writing, outreach, and leadership activities. Shelomi won a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Student Fellowship in 2012. He won the NSF East Asian and Pacific Summer Institutes Fellowship twice. Through the latter, he has done research at the National Institute of Agrobiological Science (Tsukuba, Japan) and Academia Sinica (Taipei, Taiwan).
Shelomi has served on multiple ESA Debate and Linnaean Games teams, captaining both at one point or another. He was on the Linnaean Games team that won first place at the Pacific Branch meeting in 2012. He and his debate team won the championship at the national ESA meeting in 2011. Shelomi is an active member of the PBESA’s Physiology, Biochemistry, and Toxicology Section. He has presented talks at every ESA meeting, branch and national, since 2011, and has volunteered at the national branch meetings.
He is also known for a humorous paper on Pokémon phylogenetics in the Annals of Improbable Research. He organized and ran a workshop at the International Science in Society Conference in Berkeley last November, and will be speaking this August at the International Congress of Orthopterology in Kunming, China.
Active in the Entomology Graduate Student Association, Shelomi served as treasurer from 2010 to 2011 and participates annually on the UC Davis Department of Entomology Picnic Day Committee.
Shelomi and Kimsey are coordinating a UC Davis freshman seminar this spring on Evolution vs. Creationism. He has also served as a teaching assistant for forensic entomology, and guest-lectured for several introductory biology and entomology classes.
In addition, Shelomi works with the UC Davis Entomology Club, presenting informative talks at local high schools. In the spring of 2012 he served as a columnist for the California Aggie student newspaper, writing on graduate student life, and also contributed opinion (op-ed) pieces.
Shelomi and his work are featured on a video on the PhD TV website.
“Matan is also a top writer, specializing in entomology and biology questions, on the question-and-answer website Quora,” Kimsey said. In 2012, he won a Shorty Award, the social-media equivalent of an Oscar, for his answer to an insect question. Today, he has nearly 500 followers. The Huffington Post recently spotlighted one response. Another was printed in the "Best of Quora 2010-2012" book.
“Frankly,” Kimsey said, “I don’t know when he sleeps.”
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
April 15, 2013
The UC Davis team is comprised of Matan Shelomi, doctoral student who studies with major professor Lynn Kimsey; Mohammad-Amir Aghaee, doctoral student who studies with major professor Larry Godfrey; Margaret Rei Scampavia, doctoral student who studies with major professors Edwin Lewis and Neal Williams; and Alexander Nguyen, an undergraduate (entomology major) student who volunteers at the Bohart Museum of Entomology.
Shelomi and Aghaee are veteran competitors in the Linnaean Games, while Scampavia and Nguyen are new to the team. Advisor is entomology specialist Larry Godfrey of the Department of Entomology faculty.
At the PBESA Linnaean Games, four teams competed. First UC Riverside defeated the University of Arizona. Two of their Linnaean Games questions dealt with UC Davis. One was “What is the research subject of John Henry Comstock winner Matan Shelomi?” The answer: phasmid digestive system. The other question: “In the most recent American Entomologist journal, there is an article on the entomology of fly fishing. Who is the author? Answer: Michael Parrella, professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology.
The UC Davis team won its first game, competing against Washington State University, and then lost to UC Riverside.
Some questions the UC Davis team were asked:
- “In the 2012 movie Hunger Games, heroine Katniss Eberdeen got out of a jam using certain insects, referred to as what?” (Tracker Jackers)
- "How many episodes of the X-files featured insects/arthropods?” (Nine)
- "What common spider's venom is being used to treat muscular dystrophy?” (Chilean Rose Hair Tarantula)
- "What is the family name of the robber flies?” (Asillidae)
- "Entomologist C.W. Woodworth, in addition to helping found the Agricultural Experiment Station (now UC Davis), proposing and drafting the California Insecticide Law, and proposing the use of Drosophila for genetics research, also invented and build a type of what scientific instrument?” (Telescope)
- "Termites are now grouped together with what insects?” (Cockroaches)
- "What is the Nevada state insect?” (Vivid Dancer Damselfly Argia vivida)
The University of Georgia won the 2012 Linnaean Games by defeating the University of Wisconsin at the ESA meeting held in Knoxville, Tenn.
The UC Davis team has won either first or second place in the PBESA Linnaean Games since 2010. They won the regional championship in 2012 and 2011, and second in 2010.
In last year’s finals, held in Knoxville, Tenn., UC Davis lost to the University of Wisconsin, which went on compete in the finals. The University of Georgia took home the trophy.
The Linnaean Games are named for Swedish-born Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) a renowned taxonomist, ecologist and botanist.
Links:
Rules of Linnaean Games
Watch video of 2012 Championship Linnaean Games, Knoxville, Tenn.
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
