- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The open house, free and family friendly, is set from 1 to 4 p.m., Saturday, July 16 in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the year the California State Legislature designated the dogface butterfly out to be the state insect.
Keller will read the book in the Wildlife Classroom, Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, located next door to the Bohart Museum in the Academic Surge Building.
The book features photos by Bohart associate Greg Kareofelas and Professor Keller, and illustrations by former UC Davis student Laine Bauer. The California dogface butterfly, Zerene eurydice, found only in California, thrives at its major breeding ground, the Shutamul Bear River Preserve, a private preserve maintained by the Placer Land Trust (PLT).
It is there because its host plant, false indigo, Amorpha californica, is there, points out Kareofelas, who has reared multiple California dogface butterflies from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to adult. He serves as a volunteer docent for the PLT's Shutamul Bear River Preserve.
"Most people have never seen a single dogface butterfly (in the wild)," says Kareofelas. On a June 10th tour of the preserve, held specifically for the Bohart Museum, the group saw 75 to 100 dogface butterflies.
False indigo (Amorpha), its only known host plant, "is a rather inconspicuous shrub found with poison oak, willow, etc. near streambanks, often along boulder-strewn tributary streams in side canyons where access is very difficult," Shapiro says on his website.
The schedule:
1 p.m.: Event starts
Tabling: Placer Land Trust information table, Greg Kareofelas with live caterpillar/rearing project
Activities:
- Craft: Yellow felt dogface butterflies shoe/hair/belt/wrist ornaments
- Craft: Color the dogface butterfly life cycle (paper or for $8.50 for bandanna)
- Craft: Paper caterpillar puppet
- Petting Zoo (Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects, tartantulas)
- Butterfly collection exploration with entomologist Jeff Smith, curator of the Lepidoptera collection
- Butterfly banner photo-op
1:30 p.m.: Professor and author Fran Keller reads The Story of the Dogface Butterfly in the Wildlife Classroom
2:30 p.m.: Communication specialist Julia Boorinakis Harper Barbeau of Placer Land Trust shows four-minute video and Bohart associate Greg Kareofelas gives a talk/powerpoint about the history of the dogface (5-10 minutes) in the Wildlife Classroom
3 p.m.: Celebration dessert in the hallway with Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology
3:30 p.m.: Professor and author Fran Keller reads The Story of the Dogface Butterfly in the Wildlife Classroom
4 p.m.: Event ends
The Bohart Museum, directed by UC Davis distinguished professor Lynn Kimsey, houses a global collection of eight million insect specimens. It also maintains a live petting zoo and an insect-themed gift shop (including T-shirts, hoodies, books, jewelry, posters, collecting equipment)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
A leading global scientist and inventor in the field of insect olfaction and communication, Leal was elected an NAI Fellow in 2019 for his impact in the fields of molecular, cellular biology, and entomology, but due to the COVID pandemic, the organization cancelled the 2020 Phoenix ceremony. Travel restrictions prevented him from attending the 2021 ceremony in Tampa, Fla. Elected Fellows are required to attend the induction ceremony within two years of election in order to receive their award.
NAI singles out outstanding inventors for their “highly prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society.” Election to NAI Fellow is the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors. The NAI Fellow program has 1,403 Fellows worldwide representing more than 250 prestigious universities and governmental and non-profit research institutes.
“I attended with my wife, Beatriz, and daughter Helena and son Gabriel – both have co-authored papers in the lab, so they represent all visiting scholars, collaborators, postdocs, project scientists, graduate students, and undergraduate students in my lab,” Leal said. (See video of the awarding of the medals)
UC Davis chancellor emerita Linda Katehi, an NAI fellow inducted in 2012, nominated Leal for the honor for his “novel, sustainable and continued contributions to the field of entomology and for their greater implications in molecular and cellular biology and the understanding of disease and prevention.” At the time, Leal held 28 Japanese and two U.S. patents.
Said Hammock: “When Walter Leal reached UC Davis, he came with the reputation of being a 'one man army in research.' This reputation was well deserved. I know of no one at UC Davis who matches Walter in taking his remarkable fundamental advances in science and translating them to increase the safety and magnitude of world food production.”
Leal, an expert in insect communication investigates how insects detect odors, connect and communicate within their species; and detect host and non-host plant matter. His research, spanning three decades, targets insects that carry mosquito-borne diseases as well as agricultural pests that damage and destroy crops. He and his lab drew international attention with their discovery of the mode of action of DEET, the gold standard of insect repellents.
He and his collaborators, including Nobel Laureate Kurth Wuthrich (Chemistry 2002), unravel how pheromones are carried by pheromone-binding proteins, precisely delivered to odorant receptors, and finally activated by pheromone-degrading enzymes.
That led to Leal's identification of the sex pheromones of the navel orangeworm (Amyelois transitella), a pest of almonds, figs, pomegranates and walnuts, the major hosts. This has led to practical applications of pest management techniques in the fields.
At the time of his election to NAI Fellow, Joe Rominiecki, communications manager of Entomological Society of America (ESA), said Leal has “greatly advanced scientific understanding of insect olfaction. He has identified and synthesized several insect pheromones, and his collaborative efforts led to the first structure of an insect pheromone-binding protein."
ICE Council. Leal was recently elected chair of the International Congress of Entomology Council, which selects a country to host the congress every four years and which supports the continuity of the international congresses of entomology. Leal succeeds prominent entomologist May Berenbaum of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, editor-in-chief of the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and a 2014 recipient of the National Medal of Science.
“I have big shoes to fill,” he said.
Ironically, COVID derailed the 2020 NAI ceremony, and Leal--recipient of the Academic Senate's 2022 Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award for his series of four global webinars educating the public about COVID-19--contracted the disease while in Phoenix for the 2022 ceremony.
“I was treated with Paxlovid, rebounded, and am now fully recovered,” Leal said.
On ESA Honorary Member Ballot. Leal's name is currently on the ESA ballot to become an Honorary Member, the highest ESA honor. The Royal Entomological Society named him an Honorary Fellow in 2015.
A native of Brazil, educated in Brazil and Japan, and fluent in Portuguese, Japanese and English, Leal received his master's degree and doctorate in Japan: his master's degree at Mie University in 1987, and his doctorate in applied biochemistry at Tsukuba University in 1990. Leal then conducted research for 10 years at Japan's National Institute of Sericultural and Entomological Science and the Japan Science and Technology Agency before joining the faculty of the UC Davis Department of Entomology in 2000. He chaired the department from July 2006 to February 2008.
Leal co-chaired the 2016 International Congress of Entomology meeting, "Entomology Without Borders," in Orlando, Fla., that drew the largest delegation of scientists and experts in the history of the discipline: 6682 attendees from 102 countries.
Among his many other honors, Leal is a Fellow of ESA, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and the California Academy of Sciences. He is a past president of the International Society of Chemical Ecology and corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. In 2019, ESA selected him to present its annual Founders' Memorial Lecture, the first UC Davis scientist selected to do so.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The free, family event takes place in the Bohart Museum, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus. The event will focus on the biology and history of the butterfly. A family arts and crafts activity is also planned.
Found only in California, the rarely seen butterfly is also known as (1) "the flying pansy," referring to the male's spectacular black and yellow coloring, and (2) as a "dog head" butterfly (the markings on the male resemble a silhouette of a dog's head). The female is mostly solid yellow.
The butterfly's major breeding ground is in Auburn at a preserve maintained by the Placer Land Trust (PLT). The butterfly is there because its larval host plant--false indigo (Amorpha californica)--grows well there. "The dogface butterfly has a range from San Diego County to Sonoma County and is usually found in mountain and foothill locations," according to an article on the PLT website. (Watch a virtual tour at https://youtu.be/kJUk1AKGtKs)
Meanwhile, the folks at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, including director Lynn Kimsey, museum scientist Fran Keller and Bohart associate Greg Kareofelas (he shares his expertise as a docent leading tours and delivering presentations for the Pacific Land Trust), hope to connect with the fourth grade students of Betty Harding and Shirley Klein in the Dailey Elementary School, Fresno, who advocated it as the state insect. The teachers and students enlisted the help of State Assemblyman Kenneth L. Maddy, who authored AB 1834. "His bill was read for the first time on March 15, 1972 and referred to the Assembly Committee on Government Organization, according to a state website.
"On May 25, 1972, with a committee vote of 6-2, Mr. Maddy failed to garner the needed eight votes to recommend the legislation to a floor vote. It wasn't clear why two members voted against the bill, but a bill to designate an official state fossil also gone down to defeat earlier in the day. The Fresno Bee wrote, 'Dog-Faced Butterfly Has Wings Clipped.'
"Assemblyman Maddy vowed to fight on and promised a better result when the full committee was present in the next week.
"Good to his word, Mr. Maddy moved the bill out of committee and to approval by the full Assembly on June 19. 1972.
"A month later, on July 20, the Senate voted 29-0 to approve AB 1834.
"On July 28, 1972, Governor Ronald Reagan signed Assembly Bill No. 1834 designating the California dog-face butterfly the official State Insect of California." (Read more on how the butterfly became the state insect under the Ronald Reagan administration.)
In 2013, Fran Keller, a UC Davis doctoral alumnus and now a professor at Folsom Lake College, published a 35-page children's book, The Story of the Dogface Butterfly that includes includes photos by Kareofelas and Keller and illustrations by then UC Davis student Laine Bauer. They earlier created a poster. Both the book and the poster are are available for sale in the Bohart Museum gift shop.
The book tells the untold story of the California dogface butterfly, and how schoolchildren became involved in convincing the State Legislature to select the dogface butterfly as the state insect. As part of their research, Keller, Kareofelas and Bauer visited the Placer Land Trust habitat of the butterfly. Kareofelas reared the insect from egg to adult, photographing all stages. At the open house, Keller will do a book reading for youths and their parents at 1:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m.
Kareofelas has assisted with news documentaries on the butterfly:
- Rob on the Road, KVIE, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
- Capital Public Radio, National Public Radio (NPR)
The history of how the butterfly became the state insect actually begins in the 1920s with the Lorquin Entomological Society of Los Angeles. In an October 1929 article in The Pan-Pacific Entomologist, a publication of the Pacific Coast Entomological Society, J. D. Dunder of Pasadena credits the Lorquin Entomological Society with seeking "to establish a state insect for California." Out of three choices, the group voted on the California dogface butterfly.
Dunder wrote that the butterfly is "strictly a native California butterfly" and that "thousands of specimens are used each year in entomological art work for trays, bookends, plaques, etc., so the species is already fairly well known to the pubic."
Today its image graces a first-class U.S. stamp and our California driver licenses. It's also depicted on the California State Fair monorail. The Lone Buffalo Vineyards and Winery, Auburn, memorialized it on labels of specially bottled wine, with proceeds helping conservation efforts of the Placer Land Trust to protect the butterfly.
Take a look at the amazing images that Greg Kareofelas captured of the life cycle of the California dogface butterfly.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Amber Crowley-Gall of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology will be among the rising stars featured in an international symposium on “The Frontiers in Chemical Ecology,” part of the Aug. 8-12 joint meeting of the International Society of Chemical Ecology (ISCE) and the Asia-Pacific Association of Chemical Ecologists (APACE) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Crowley-Gall, a two-year USDA-NIFA (U.S. Department of Agriculture/National Institute of Food and Agriculture) postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of associate professor and community ecologist Rachel Vannette, will present "Olfactory Variation Among Closely Related Cactophilic Drosophila Species," a collaborative project with her doctoral dissertation advisor, Professor Stephanie Rollmann of the University of Cincinnati.
“I am very excited about the opportunity to participate in this symposium,” said Crowley-Gall, who holds a doctorate in biological sciences from the University of Cincinnati (2019), and a bachelor's degree in biological sciences, magna cum laude, from Wright State University (2012).
UC Davis distinguished professor Walter Leal of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and a former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, is organizing and producing the hybrid (in-person and virtual) symposium.
Others to be spotlighted in the Frontiers symposium: postdoctoral fellows Rick Fandino of Cornell University and Ani Agnihotri of Murdoch University; soon-to-be-assistant professor Dan Peach of the University of Georgia; associate professors Mengbo Guo of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Zain Syed of the University of Kentucky (formerly of the Walter Leal lab, UC Davis) and Karen Menuz of the University of Connecticut; and professor Chen-Zhu Wang, of the Chinese Academy Sciences.
"I am grateful for this opportunity to present my research and network with other chemical ecologists around the world," said postdoctoral scholar Rick Fandino, a research associate at Cornell University's Department of Ecology and Evolution. "As a first-generation U.S. American Latinx these opportunities are critical to advance in highly competitive and underrepresented STEM fields."
“It's incredibly supportive of Walter to use his standing in the field to help elevate early career researchers," said selected participant Greg Pask, an assistant professor of biology, Middlebury College, Vermont. "And I'm excited to hear about the exciting research from this generation of chemical ecologists.” (For more on the invited speakers, access this short video at https://youtu.be/liy9HpKTmOo)
The ISCE-APACE joint meeting, themed “Managing Sustainability in Challenging Times,” will include 15 plenary, 15 symposia, as well as invited lectures. Among the lectures is the inaugural Wittko Francke Daaks-Chemicals Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Wittko Francke's Daaks-Chemicals Fund. ISCE promotes the understanding of interactions between organisms and their environment that are mediated by naturally occurring chemicals.
First In-Depth Analysis. Crowley-Gall's research on Drosophila repleta is "the first in-depth analysis of the olfactory system across the repleta group and provides the opportunity to test for conserved mechanisms in the olfactory system underlying divergence and host shift." A species of vinegar fly in the family Drosophilidae, D. repleta is a carrier of foodborne illnesses.
"Chemical cues are important for a wide range of tasks such as host plant identification and localization, oviposition site selection, and mate recognition," she explains in the abstract of the paper, co-authored by Stephanie Rollmann, John Layne, Aaron Hamrick, Lucinda Lawson, all of the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Cincinnnati. "Insects use volatile cues emitted from plants when navigating toward an appropriate host and divergence in odor detection has been shown to result in shifts in host use between populations and in some cases reproductive isolation between populations and eventual speciation. A comparative phylogenetic approach can determine whether variation in the olfactory system is linked to shifts in host plant use and is a means to determine the influence of olfactory tuning on divergence between species.
"A useful model to examine this is the Drosophila repleta species group, a radiation of flies specializing on cacti, that exhibits three types of host use: 1) Opuntia specialists, 2) columnar specialists, and 3) “generalists” on both. Opuntia, a flat leaf cactus, is hypothesized to be the ancestral host, and the use of the more chemically complex columnar cactus is believed to be an acquired trait. Columnar cacti contain elevated levels of secondary compounds that can be toxic to flies and affect the volatile headspace flies are exposed to when choosing a suitable host plant. This study examined the extent to which odor tuning has diverged along with the repeated shifts in host plants within the Drosophila repleta species group. We characterized odor response profiles from select sensillar subtypes across multiple species within the repletagroup as well as the outgroup D. melanogaster. Variation in both sensitivity and specificity to odors was observed, with some ORNs exhibiting variation associated with host cactus use. This study is the first in-depth analysis of the olfactory system across the repleta group and provides the opportunity to test for conserved mechanisms in the olfactory system underlying divergence and host shift."
Bedoukian Research, Inc. will sponsor the Frontiers in Chemical Ecology symposium. The public can sign up for the free-accesswebinar here: https://bit.ly/3PeXJhu.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The Bohart Museum of Entomology open house, "Eight-Legged Encounters," co-sponsored by the American Arachnological Society (AAS) and held June 25 in the Academic Surge Building, drew more than 250 attendees and 40 volunteers.
"It was an absolutely amazing event!" said arachnologist Jason Bond of UC Davis, co-host of the AAS meeting.
"We were pleased to see such a large turnout from the community but even more so delighted to see so many young people," said Bond, associate dean, UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and professor and the Evert and Marion Schlinger Chair in Insect Systematics, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. "There were over 40 volunteer arachnologists representing a national and international contingent of expertise. While we couldn't have done it without them, they also contributed a tremendous amount of expertise, excitement, and energy to the event."
Hebets, the Charles Bessey Professor at UNL and president of the Animal Behavior Society, co-hosted the open house as part of a U.S. National Science Foundation grant, “Eight-Legged Encounters” that she developed as an outreach project to connect arachnologists with communities, especially youth. (See her website).
Some 20 activity tables lined the hallway of the Academic Surge Building.
"Our Eight-Legged Encounters event at the UC Davis Bohart Museum far exceeded our expectations!" said Professor Hebets. "It was an incredibly successful event, with well over 250 attendees and more then 40 volunteers, many of which were graduate students and post-doctoral researchers from across the country and world. There is no doubt it was a life-changing experience for some of our young attendees as well as some of the student volunteers. I am so very thankful for the help and support we received from the Bohart Museum and from Dr. Jason Bond and his laboratory. It could not have happened without them."
Bond co-hosted the AAS conference, held June 26-30 on the UC Davis campus, with Lisa Chamberland, postdoctoral research associate of the Bond lab, and Joel Ledford, assistant professor of teaching, Department of Plant Biology, College of Biological Sciences. Chamberland coordinated the spider-species naming project with second-year doctoral student Emma Jochim of the Bond lab and incoming doctoral student Iris Bright, who starts this fall. No winner has yet been announced.
Some of the displays:
- "Black widow hourglasses are actually on their bellies. These spiders are actually social!"--Laura
- "I want to learn what is in spider venom and how it helps catch prey."--Greta
- "Trapdoor spiders live in California and eat bugs. There are many unknown species. I use DNA to find new species."-Jim
The Bohart Museum also drew scores of visitors during the 1 to 4 p.m. open house. Entomologist Jeff Smith, curator of the Lepidoptera collection and Bohart associate Greg Kareofelas showed visitors butterfly and moth specimens, while other volunteers discussed other collections, including spider wasps and small-headed flies. The museum, directed by UC Davis distinguished professor Lynn Kimsey, houses a global collection of eight million insect specimens, as well as a live "petting zoo" (Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects and tarantulas) and an insect-themed gift shop.