- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Nieh will present his seminar at 4:10 p.m., Monday, Dec. 4 in Room 122 of Briggs Hall and also on Zoom. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672
"Karl von Frisch referred to the waggle dance as the 'magic well' for the insights that it provides not only on honey bees, but on the general cognitive complexity that social insects are capable of," Nieh writes in his abstract. "New research demonstrates that the neurotransmitter, dopamine, the 'pleasure molecule' plays a similar hedonic role in honey bees as it does in many vertebrates, regulating the perception of danger and the anticipation of food rewards as revealed in the excitatory waggle dance and the associated, inhibitory stop signal. I will also discuss new data showing that the honey bee waggle dance is partially learned and has elements that may be culturally transmitted. Together, these findings, demonstrate that the waggle dance can teach us a great deal about shared cognitive mechanisms and the importance of social learning across taxa."
In an article titled "Unlocking Secrets of the Honeybee Dance Language--Bees Learn and Culturally Transmit Their Communication Skills," and published March 9, 2023 in The Conversation, Nieh described the waggle dance as "one of the most complicated examples of nonhuman communication. They can tell each other were to find resources such as food, water, or nest sites with a physical 'waggle dance.' this dance conveys the This dance conveys the direction, distance and quality of a resource to the bee's nestmates."
Nieh related exactly how the bees perform the waggle dance. "Essentially, the dancer points recruits in the correct direction and tells them how far to go by repeatedly circling around in a figure eight pattern centered around a waggle run, in which the bee waggles its abdomen as it moves forward. Dancers are pursued by potential recruits, bees that closely follow the dancer, to learn where to go to find the communicated resource."
"Longer waggle runs communicate greater distances," Nieh wrote, "and the waggle angle communicates direction. For higher-quality resources such as sweeter nectar, dancers repeat the waggle run more times and race back faster after each waggle run."
Nieh noted that "The Greek historian Herodotus reported over 2,000 years ago on a misguided forbidden experiment in which two children were prevented from hearing human speech so that a king could discover the true, unlearned language of human beings.
"Scientists now know that human language requires social learning and interaction with other people, a property shared with multiple animal languages. But why should humans and other animals need to learn a language instead of being born with this knowledge, like many other animal species?"
Nieh went on to point out that "This question fascinates me and my colleagues and is the basis for our recent paper published in the journal Science. As a biologist, I have spent decades studying honeybee communication and how it may have evolved."
Nieh received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1991 and his doctorate from Cornell University in 1997. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship funded by NSF-NAT0 (National Science Foundation, North Atlantic Treaty Organization) at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He served as a Harvard Junior Fellow from 1998-2000
Seminar coordinator is Brian Johnson, associate professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. For Zoom technical issues, he may be reached at brnjohnson@ucdavis.edu. The list of seminars is posted here.
Resources:
- Social Signal Learning of the Waggle Dance in Honey Bees, March 9, 2023, Science
- Bees Can Teach Their Young to Dance, March 9, 2023, Washington Post
- The Waggle Dance, PBS documentary on YouTube
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Dag will present his seminar at 4:10 p.m. in Room 122 of Briggs Hall. It also will be on Zoom: the Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/
"Tree crops belonging to the Rosaceae, such as almond, pear, apple, and sweet cherry, depend on cross-pollination by insects to set fruit," Dag says in his abstract. "The primary pollinator of the crops is the honey bee (Apis mellifera). However, due to harsh climatic conditions during flowering, limited movement of bees between cultivars, low preference of the bees for flowers of the target crop, and limited overlap in flowering between the cultivars, pollination is a primary factor limiting yield. Our group has tested multiple approaches to mitigate this problem: Using 'Pollen dispensers,' sequential introduction of beehives to the orchards, selection of honeybee strains with higher preference for the target crop, introduction of bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) colonies and phosphorous fertilization to increase nectar secretion and improve crop-flower attractiveness. I will summarize the effects of those methods on fruit set and yield in apples, almonds, and pears."
A native of Moshav Lachish, Israel, Dag received his bachelor's degree (1990) and master's degree (1992) in life sciences at the Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University. His master's thesis: "Improving the Honey Bee Efficiency of Melon Pollination in Greenhouses." He obtained his doctorate in agriculture at the Horticulture, Faculty of Agriculture at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His thesis: "Pollenizers, Pollinators and Pollination in Mango." He held postdoctoral positions at both Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Dag's research interests include fruit tree physiology, olive biology and cultivation, reproductive biology of fruit trees, crop pollination, pomology in semi-arid conditions and "developing guava as an export crop."
He served as an Extension specialist in beekeeping from 1991 to 2003 for the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture.
Seminar coordinator is Brian Johnson, associate professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. For Zoom technical issues, he may be reached at brnjohnson@ucdavis.edu. The list of seminars is posted here.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
There's plenty to love and purchase in the Bohart Museum of Entomology gift shop and on the UC Davis Entomology Graduate Student Association (EGSA) website.
EGSA members design insect and arachnid-themed T-shirts that climb, crawl, jump, roll, flutter, buzz, fly or otherwise position themselves on EGSA T-shirts. They can be viewed and ordered online at https://mkt.com/UCDavisEntGrad/.
EGSA president Mia Lippey, a doctoral student in the laboratories of UC Davis distinguished professor Jay Rosenheim and assistant professor Emily Meineke, says that currently, the designs offered are:
- The Beetles (in black or red)
- Entomo Gothic (a play on the American Gothic, in grey)
- Whip Scorpion (in lavender and black)
- Bee-Haw (in black)
- They See Me Rollin' (dung beetles rolling a poop, in heather blue)
- Et in Terra (dark green)
- Entomophagy (in blue and green)
At the Bohart Museum, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, the gift shop is stocked with everything from T-shirts, hooded sweatshirts, jewelry, books, posters, stickers, and note cards to lathe pens and insect-collecting equipment. See more at https://bohart.ucdavis.edu/line-gift-shop. Items may be purchased only in the gift shop, not online.
New items include tardigrade, bumble bee and monarch pens, monarch and stick insect stickers from a local artist, and a new mosquito stuffed toys or plushies, including a giant one that comes with viruses, said Brennen Dyer, the Bohart Museum's (specimen) collection manager.
Newest t-shirts are designed with tardigrades, also known as water bears. The Bohart Museum's tardigrade current collection includes some 25,000 slide-mounted specimens, and a six-foot-long concrete sculpture by Solomon Bassoff of North San Juan, Calif., graces the entrance to the Academic Surge building.
The Bohart Museum, founded in 1946, is directed by UC Davis distinguished professor Lynn Kimsey. It houses a global collection of eight million insect specimens. In addition to its gift shop, it is also the home of a live petting zoo. The Bohart is closed on specific days during the holiday season. See hours on the website.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
One UC Davis doctoral alumnus and 10 current or former members of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology are listed as among the world's top two percent of entomologists in a database announced by Stanford University with data from Elsevier's “science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators.”
A separate list, gleaned from the main document, names the world's top entomologists, totaling 708. UC Davis alumnus Murray Isman, who received his doctorate in 1981 from UC Davis, studying entomology and toxicology, is ranked No. 2. He is the dean emeritus of the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Land and Food Systems and emeritus professor of entomology and toxicology at UBC.
The highest UC Davis entomologist/faculty member on that list is No. 22-ranked UC Davis distinguished professor Walter Leal of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, former professor and chair of the Department of Entomology (now Department of Entomology and Nematology).
Other UC Davis entomologists on the list, in the order of ranking, are:
- Jay Rosenheim, No. 68
- Harry Kaya, 206
- Fumio Matsumura (1934-2012), 208
- James R. Carey, 232
- Robbin Thorp (1933-2019) 321
- Christian Nansen, 452
- Lester Ehler (1946-2016) 593
- Robert E. Page Jr., 548
- Frank Zalom, 557
Elsevier. Elsevier, a global information analytics company that helps institutions and professionals progress science, advance healthcare and improve performance, published its "science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators" on Oct. 4, 2023. The ranking of scientists is at https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw. It is a publicly available database "of top-cited scientists that provides standardized information on citations, h-index, co-authorship adjusted hm-index, citations to papers in different authorship positions and a composite indicator (c-score). Separate data are shown for career-long and, separately, for single recent year impact. Metrics with and without self-citations and ratio of citations to citing papers are given. Scientists are classified into 22 scientific fields and 174 sub-fields according to the standard Science-Metrix classification. Field- and subfield-specific percentiles are also provided for all scientists with at least 5 papers. Career-long data are updated to end-of-2022 and single recent year data pertain to citations received during calendar year 2022. The selection is based on the top 100,000 scientists by c-score (with and without self-citations) or a percentile rank of 2% or above in the sub-field. This version (6) is based on the October 1, 2023 snapshot from Scopus, updated to end of citation year 2022. This work uses Scopus data provided by Elsevier through ICSR Lab (https://www.elsevier.com/icsr/icsrlab). Calculations were performed using all Scopus author profiles as of October 1, 2023. If an author is not on the list it is simply because the composite indicator value was not high enough to appear on the list. It does not mean that the author does not do good work."
Scientists from China filtered the list to spotlight only entomologists. The list is at https://wxredian.com/art?id=9f6eea221698e282/.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Danchin will speak on "Parasitic Success in the Absence of Sex: What Have We Learned from Nematode Genomes?" at 4:10 p.m., Monday, Nov. 20 in Room 122 of Briggs Hall. It also will be on Zoom. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672
Danchin, who specializes in genomics and adaptive molecular evolution, is with INRAE (French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment) and is a senior scientist and scientific leader of the GAME team (Genomics and Adaptive Molecular Evolution) at ISA (Institut Sophia Agrobiotech), in Sophia-Antipolis, on the French Riviera.
"Root-knot nematodes are devastating plant parasites of worldwide importance. Interestingly, species that cause most damages reproduce entirely asexually," he writes in his abstract. "These nematodes are extremely polyphagous and have a wide geographic range. Theoretically, in the absence of sexual recombination animal species have lower adaptive potential and are predicted to undergo genome decay. To investigate how these species can be successful parasites on many hosts and in many places around the world, we have sequenced and analyzed their genomes. Out analysis confirmed these species are polyploid hybrids and the combination of several genotypes from different species might provide them with a general-purpose genotype. However, this does not explain how with a theoretically fixed genotype these species are able to overcome resistance genes or adapt to a new host. Therefore, we analyzed genomic variability across different populations and the possible mechanisms underlying genomic variations. In this presentation, I will provide an overview of our findings."
Etienne holds a doctorate in reproductive biology from the University of Paris (1980). He says on his website: "I am an evolutionary biologist working with genomes. I try to make biological sense of genomic singularities observed through comparative genomics. I have a special interest in plant parasites and I use bioinformatics as a tool to perform this research."
He lists his main research interests as:
- The impact of non tree-like evolution such as horizontal gene transfers and hybridization on species biology
- Evolution and adaptation of animals in the absence of sexual reproduction and the underlying mechanisms
- Genomic signatures of adaptation to a parasitic life-style
Seminar coordinator is Brian Johnson, associate professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. For Zoom technical issues, he may be reached at brnjohnson@ucdavis.edu. The list of seminars is posted here.