(From UC Davis News Service and Department of Entomology)
April 1, 2013
He is one of four young UC Davis faculty members selected for the award. Others are Ken Loh, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, who received $400,000; Stephen O'Driscoll, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, who received $400,000; and Ilias Tagkopoulos, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and the UC Davis Genome Center, who received $600,000. Together they received $2 million.
The NSF fund projects aimed at developing new nanomaterials, smaller medical implants, "biological circuits" and a better understanding of timing in ecosystems.
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. His $600,000 award will support work that will provide new knowledge about how natural communities respond to such changes.
Yang was also recently selected as a UC Davis Hellman Fellow and will be honored at a luncheon in May of 2014. He received a $10,000 award to support his research activities investigating the timing of milkweed (Asclepias spp.) and monarch (Danaus plexippus) interactions in western North America due to climate change. His research addresses two main questions: “How has the relative timing of species interactions changed in the recent past?” and “What are the fitness consequences of phenological shifts?”
Yang's research interests include community ecology, species interactions, temporal variation, extreme events in nature, and the integration of ontogeny and phenology.
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.
NSF's Faculty Early Career Development Program supports junior faculty who perform outstanding research, are excellent educators, and who integrate education and research in their work. The awards, known as CAREER awards, typically support both a five-year research program and a program of outreach and education in local schools and colleges.
Including these latest awards, current UC Davis faculty members have held a total of 63 NSF CAREER awards.
See UC Davis News Release by Andy Fell
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
April 3, 2013
Katharina Ullmann of the Neal Williams lab is the host. The seminar is scheduled to be recorded for later viewing on UCTV.
“Increasing demands for food, and now fuel, have put pressure on our agricultural lands,” Gratton says. “Land use and land cover are continuing to change the way we manage our lands with significant biological and ecosystem-level consequences.”
“The ‘simplification’ of the agricultural landscape, that is the removal of natural and semi-natural areas in the landscape and the increase in monocultures of annual crops, is typically associated with a decrease in species richness and increases in crop pest abundance,” he said. “ These effects go beyond mere aesthetics. The consequences of landscape simplification are felt by growers who apply more pesticides in landscapes dominated by annual cropland. The question then, is can we balance our needs for agricultural production (both food and fuel) in a way that supports other ecosystem services on which we as humans depend?”
“I argue that understanding the relationships between landscape structure and the tradeoffs between ecosystem services will be a key a designing ‘custom’ multifunctional landscapes.”
Gratton joined the University of Wisconsin faculty in 2003. His research group works broadly in the field of landscape ecology in both agricultural and natural systems. In Wisconsin agriculture, he has been interested in understanding how beneficial insects, such as pollinators and lady beetles, utilize the landscape and carry out important functions such as pollination of crops and suppression of insect pests.
His work in agroecology has included studying insect landscape ecology and conservation in potatoes, rotational grazing, grasslands, soybeans, cranberries, apples.
Gratton has worked with growers to understand how to best manage non-crop “natural” areas in the landscape in order to enhance and conserve beneficial insects. He is also an active member of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center as part of the team looking at developing sustainable bioenergy crops. He teaches courses in Insect Biological Control, Multivariate Analysis and Coastal Field Ecology.
He received his bachelor of science degree in biology from the University of Illinois in 1991 and his doctorate in entomology from UC Berkeley in 1997.
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
Mark your calenders!
The Honey and Pollination Center at the University of California, Davis, has postponed its "Luncheon in the Garden" initially set Sunday, June 2 from noon to 3 p.m. in the Good Life Garden at the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science on campus.
Executive director Amina Harris says plans call for the event to be rescheduled in October. it will be a "dazzling five-course meal from appetizers to cheese and desserts. Each course features honeys from around the globe."
The luncheon, open to the public, supports and introduces the Honey and Pollination Center. Food and drink will be provided by chefs, apiaries, wineries and meaderies (think wine made from honey), and the farmers of California.
What is the Honey and Pollination Center? Its vision is to establish UC Davis as a global center of excellence and education on bees, honey and pollination.
Its mission:
- Promote the use of high quality honey in the California market, help ensure the sustainability of honey production in California, and showcase the importance of honey and pollination to the well-being of Californians.
- Spearhead efforts to gain support and assemble teams for research, education and outreach programs for various stakeholder groups including: (1) the beekeeping industry, (2) agricultural interests who depend on bee pollination, (3) backyard beekeepers, and (4) the food industry
Its specific goals are five-fold:
- To optimize university resources by coordinating a multidisciplinary team of experts in honeyproduction, pollination and bee health
- To expand research and education efforts addressing the production, nutritional value, health benefits, economics, quality standards and appreciation of honey
- To serve the various agricultural stakeholders that depend on pollination services
- To help the industry develop informative and descriptive labeling guidelines for honey and bee-related products to establish transparency in the marketplace
- To elevate the perceived value of varietal honey to producers and consumers through education, marketing, and truth-in-labeling with the end goal of increasing the consumption of honey
For more information, contact events manager Tracy Diesslin at (530) 752-5233 or at tdiesslin@ucdavis.edu.
And if you'd like to make a donation, contact Harris at (530) 754-9301 or aharris@ucdavis.edu.
(Editor's Note: Here's the newly created Facebook page.)
April 3, 2013
No wonder. The insect, measuring about 1.5 millimeters long, is much smaller than a grain of rice.
Now, however, they can see a teddy-bear-sized version, thanks to a University of California, Davis entomology major Kristina Tatiossian, a member of the Research Scholars Program in Insect Biology.
Through the UC Davis Art/Science Fusion Program, Tatiossian, a junior, crafted a ceramic mosaic sculpture of the tiny walnut twig beetle for her research poster, “Flight Response of the Walnut Twig Beetle, Pityophthorus juglandis, to Aggregation Pheromones Produced by Low Densities of Males.”
The beetle jutting from the poster is so true to form that scientists studying the insect not only readily recognize it, but point out that it’s a female. That includes her mentor, chemical ecologist and forest entomologist Steve Seybold of the Davis-based Pacific Southwest Research Station, USDA Forest Service, and an affiliate of the UC Davis Department of Entomology.
Seybold and Andrew Graves, a former UC Davis researcher with the UC Davis Department of Plant Pathology, who now works for the USDA Forest Service, first detected the newly recognized beetle-fungus disease, known as Thousand Cankers Disease (TCD), in California in 2008. TCD had been detected earlier in Colorado and its impact had been noted even earlier in New Mexico, Oregon, and Utah. TCD and its history are chronicled in a newly revised “Pest Alert” issued by the USDA Forest Service.
The beetle, emerging from a gallery of a black walnut tree, is accurate right down to the concentric ridges that occur on the skin (cuticle) that protects its head. Some observers claim the beetle is smiling and could be a cartoon character.
Tatiossian completed the ceramic mosaic project over a four-week period. She earlier worked on two UC Davis Art/Science Fusion Program projects, including the “Tree of Life,” with the program’s founders, entomologist/artist Diane Ullman and artist Donna Billick. A former Los Angeles resident, Tatiossian will receive her bachelor’s degree in entomology this June and then plans to attend graduate school to study either biochemistry or virology.
Meanwhile, the poster is making the rounds. Tatiossian entered the poster in the Entomological Society of America’s student poster competition last year at its meeting in Knoxville, Tenn., where it drew lots of attention, not only for the research project but for the art.
Tatiossian will giving an oral presentation on her research at the Pacific Branch, ESA meeting, set for April 7-10 at South Lake Tahoe. Then she will display the poster again in the Undergraduate Research Conference at UC Davis on April 24 in Wellman Hall.
The disease is creating havoc throughout much of the western United States, Seybold said, and is now heading east. Its primary host is the black walnut tree but it also attacks other walnut trees.
On her poster, Tatiossian explained that the walnut twig beetle (WTB), in association with the fungus, causes the newly recognized disease, Thousand Cankers Disease. WTB vectors the fungal pathogen, which infects phloem tissue around the beetle galleries, she wrote. “Numerous localized infections have led to the common name of the disease.”
“Male WTB initiate new galleries and produce an aggregation pheromone, which can be used to study patterns of initial host colonization behavior of WTB. It has been previously shown by Graves and colleagues (2010) that as the number of males in a branch is increased from 20 to 200, the flight response of males and females is similarly increased,” she wrote. “We investigated flight responses to lower numbers of males in cut branch sections of northern California black walnut, Juglans hindsii.”
Her objective: “To determine the minimum number of males in an artificially infested branch of Juglans hindsii necessary to elicit a flight response from WTB.” She found that as little as one to five males is enough to elicit the aggregation response at her field study sites at two locations in Davis.
The poster will be displayed on the third floor of Briggs Hall, just outside the Department of Entomology’s administration office.
On her poster, Tatiossian credits Seybold; Extension entomologist Mary Louise Flint, associate director for Urban and Community IPM, UC Statewide Integrated Pest Program; entomology graduate student Stacy Hishinuma, and postdoctoral researcher Yigen Chen of the UC Davis Department of Entomology.
And the UC Davis Art/Science Fusion Program where the tiny walnut twig beetle sprang to life.
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
March 27, 2013
Van Dam studies with major professor Bernie May in the Department of Animal Science. Professors Jay Rosenheim and Steve Nadler of the Department of Entomology are members of his dissertation committee.
The postdoctoral fellowship award is supported by both the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Office of International Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation. During his two-year fellowship, he will work on a project, “New Insights into Insect Host-Plant Generalization: Population Transcriptome Sequencing of Porphyrophora spp.” under the sponsorship of Uffe H. Mortensen at the Department of Systems Biology, Technical University of Denmark.
For his postdoctoral research, Van Dam will identify genes responsible for host-plant range in scale insects, and how they are maintained across populations. “This will be accomplished by testing hypotheses delineating physiological genes responsible for insect host-plant generalization,” he said. “Host-plant generalization is the ability to feed on many different species of plants. I will test if increased dispersal of host-plant detoxification genes in generalists leads to maintenance of functional gene paralogs, that is, gene duplications, across large effective populations.
“Concomitantly specialists are expected to accumulate mutations due to loss of selection on a wide range of host-plants and have small effective population sizes. I will be using two species within the scale insect genus Porphyrophora, one that is a generalist (P. polonica), and the other a specialist (P. tritici). I will reconstruct a draft genome of P. polonica that will serve as a backbone to align transcriptomes of P. polonica and P. tritici collected from wheat (Triticum aestivum), and from divergent host-plant species for the generalists P. polonica. In parallel I will use selectively neutral SNP markers to construct genotypes, and test if larger effective population sizes are linked to an increase in host-plant breadth.”
Van Dam will be giving his exit seminar at the Animal Science Spring Seminar Series on Monday, April 29 from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in Weir Room 2154, Meyer Hall.
He is a past recipient of a Robert and Peggy van den Bosch Memorial Scholarship for his research on a scale insect. His project was titled "Investigating Host-Associated Lineage Splitting Within Dactylopius Using Molecular Phylogenetics."
He also received a $12,000 award from the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS), an academic research institute dedicated to encouraging, securing, and contributing to binational and Latino research and collaborative academic programs and exchanges.
A native of Los Angeles, Van Dam earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in entomology from UC Riverside.
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
