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
March 27, 2013
Nadler, the principal investigator of the UC Davis-based project, and co-principal investigator James Baldwin of the UC Riverside Department of Nematology, received the $646,300 grant through the ARTS Program (Advancing Revisionary Taxonomy and Systematics) of the NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology.
The title of the project, to be funded beginning June 1, is “ARTS: Overcoming the Nematode Taxonomic Impediment through Integration of Novel Tools for Species Discovery and Phylogeny: Cephaloboidea as a Case-Study.” The primary study site is the Philip L. Boyd Deep Canyon Reserve Research Center, Palm Desert, a UC Reserve.
“Human existence depends on soil, soil organisms and their processes; these are basic to sustaining environmental systems, agriculture and human well-being,” Nadler said. “Microscopic nematodes are a key component to soil systems; they are unmatched in species diversity, often with thousands of individuals in a handful of soil. Surprisingly, most nematode species remain hidden to science, that is, undiscovered and unnamed; their species-specific environmental roles are generally not understood at a level useful to define, understand and sustain healthy ecosystems.”
“This project develops new DNA/microscopy technology to implement novel, efficient, cost-saving approaches to nematode species discovery and description, including evolutionary and ecological relationships,” Nadler said. “A California desert is the experimental site for developing these tools, but the application/benefits are global.”
More than 28,000 species of nematodes, or roundworms, of the estimated 1 million species throughout the world, have been described.
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
March 20, 2013
His seminar, the first of the department's spring seminars, is from 12:05 to 1 p.m. It will be recorded and available later on UCTV.
"Despite aggressive and costly efforts by government agencies to prevent their introduction, establishment and spread, California has experienced an inexorable march of tropical fruit flies (Tephritidae) into the state with three-fold more species detected and thousands more flies captured than in all other mainland U.S. states combined," Carey says.
"Since 1954 when the first fly was detected a total of 17 species in 4 genera and 11,386 individuals (adults/larvae) have been detected at over 3,348 locations in 330 cities. My colleagues and I conclude from spatial mapping analyses of historical capture patterns and modeling that, despite the approximately 250 emergency eradication projects that have been directed against these pests by state and federal agencies, a minimum of 5 and as many as 9 or more tephritids are established and widespread. This list includes three of the most economically-important species in the world—the Mediterranean, Mexican and oriental fruit flies."
Carey, professor and the former vice chair of the Department of Entomology, focuses his research on insect demography, mortality dynamics, and insect invasion biology. He received his bachelor and master of science degrees from Iowa State University (1973; 1975) and his doctorate in entomology from UC Berkeley (1980).
He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Gerontological Society of America, the California Academy of Science, and the Entomological Society of America. Carey served on the California Department of Food and Agriculture's Medfly Scientific Advisory Panel from 1987-1994, testified to the California Legislature "Committee of the Whole" in 1990 on the Medfly Crisis in California, and authored the paper "Establishment of the Mediterranean Fruit Fly in California" (1992, Science 258, 457).
Coordinating the spring quarter-seminars are assistant professors Joanna Chiu and Brian Johnson. All seminars will take place on Wednesday from 12:05 to 1 p.m. in Room 1022 of Life Sciences Addition except for the Storer Lecture (see below)
The list of speakers:
April 3
James R. Carey
Professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology
Title: "From Trickle to Flood: The Large-scale, Cryptic Invasion of California by Tropical Fruit Flies"
April 10
Claudio Gratton
Associate professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Title: "Sustainable Bioenergy Landscapes: Can We Balance Our Need for Production and Diodiversity?"
Host: Katharina Ullman of Neal Williams lab
April 17
Bradley White
Assistant professor, UC Riverside
Title: "Ecological Genomics of Malaria Mosquitoes"
Host: Greg Lanzaro
April 24
David Goulson
Professor, University of Stirling, U.K.
Title: "The Ecology and Conservation of Bumble Bees"
Host: Neal Williams
May 1
Jeffrey Aldrich
Associate Entomologist, UC Davis
Title: The North American Invasion of the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, Halyomorpha hales(Heteroptera: Pentatomidae) and Its Semiochemistry"
Host: Kelly Hamby
May 8
Brittany Nelms (Exit seminar)
Doctoral candidate, UC Davis
Title: "Overwintering Biology of Culex Mosquitoes in California and Their Potential Role as Overwintering Reservoirs of West Nile Virus"
Host: William Reisen
May 22
Sanford Eigenbrode
Professor, University of Idaho
Title: Variable Climates and Insects Affecting PNW Cereal Cropping Systems
Host: Michael Parrella
May 29
Fran Keller (exit seminar)
Doctoral candidate, UC Davis
Title: "Taxonomy of Stenomorpha Solier, 1836 (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae: Asidini"
Host: Lynn Kimsey
STORER ENDOWMENT IN LIFE SCIENCES
June 5
Nancy Moran
Professor, Yale University
Title: TBA
Time: 4:10 p.m.
Site: Genome Center Lecture Hall
Host: Leslie Saul-Gershanz
Reception to follow in Gunrock
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
