- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Zoom links and times will be announced for each speaker, he said.
The list:
- 10/1/20
Gil Rosenthal, Texas A&M
“Mate Choice and its Consequences for Speciation and Hybridization”
Host: Gail Patricelli - 10/8/20
Nandita Garud, UCLA
“Rapid Adaptation in Natural Populations: Lessons from Drosophila and the Human Microbiome”
Host: Kate Lane - 10/15/20
Sarah Fitzpatrick, W. K. Kellogg Biological Station, Michigan State University
“Linking Evolution and Demography through Genetic Rescue of Small Populations”
Host: Erin Calfee - 10/22/20
Jenny Ouyang, University of Nevada, Reno
“Ecology and Evolution of Physiological Traits in a Changing World”
Host: Thomas Coombs-Hahn - 10/29/20
Gillian Bowser, Colorado State University
“Ecological Racism: The Blindness to Environmental and Social Justice in Ecological Research”
Host: Frederick Nelson - 11/5/20
Alison Feder, UC Berkeley
“Probing Tumor Evolutionary Progression through Space and Time”
Host: Matt Osmond - 11/12/20
Ellen Damschen, University of Wisconsin
“Local and Landscape Influences on Plant Community Dynamics in a Changing World”
Host: Susan Harrison - 11/19/20
Anurag Agrawal, Cornell University
“Ecological and Evolutionary Effects of Suppressing Insect Herbivores in a Long-term Field Experiment”
Host: Danielle De La Pascua - 11/26/20
Thanksgiving, No Seminar - 12/3/20
Emily Darling, Wildlife Conservation Society, New York City
“Big Data on Coral Reefs for Ecology, Conservation, and International Policy”
Host: Brooke Benson - 12/10/20
Susana Wadgymar, Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina
“Can Assisted Gene Flow Rescue Populations that are Threatened by Climate Change?”
Host: Elena Suglia
Contact: Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra at rossibarra@ucdavis.edu
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's all in the interest of science.
Beginning Jan. 1, Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, is sponsoring his annual “Beer for a Butterfly Contest.” The first person in the three-county area of Sacramento, Yolo and Solano who collects the first live cabbage white butterfly, Pieris rapae, of the new year--outdoors--wins a pitcher of beer or its equivalent.
Shapiro, who maintains a research website at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu, launched the contest in 1972 as part of his scientific research to record the first flight of the butterfly in the three-county area. It's a contest he usually wins. He has been defeated only four times, and all by UC Davis graduate students.
Since 1972, the first flight has varied from Jan. 1 to Feb. 22, averaging about Jan. 20.
In 2018, he collected the winner at 11:23 a.m. Friday, Jan. 19 in one of his frequented sites—a mustard patch by railroad tracks in West Sacramento, Yolo County.
“I spotted the male butterfly dorsal basking (sunbathing) on low vegetation shortly after the first cumulous formed at 11 a.m.,” the professor remembers. “As I approached to collect it, a small cumulus occluded the sun and it closed its wings over its back--allowing me to just pick it up without using my net at all, and drop it into a glassine envelope. It turned out that that was the ONLY cloud that crossed the sun in the next two and a half hours! It got up to about 60 degrees and was a gorgeous day with a trace of a west wind.”
He described the butterfly as quite yellow instead of white. “Cold weather promotes sepiapterin formation, so early ones are often quite yellow.”
This is the eighth year since 2010 that the winning butterfly has been collected in Yolo County. In 2017, Shapiro found the winner on the UC Davis campus; in 2016, graduate student Jacob Montgomery netted the winner outside his home in west Davis, and Shapiro collected all five winners from 2012 to 2015 in West Sacramento. He found the 2011 winner in Suisun, Solano County.
Shapiro's graduate student, Adam Porter, defeated him in 1983. Two other graduate students, Sherri Graves and Rick VanBuskirk, each won in the late 1990s.
The butterfly inhabits vacant lots, fields and gardens where its host plants, weedy mustards, grow. The male is white. The female is often slightly buffy; the "underside of the hindwing and apex of the forewing may be distinctly yellow and normally have a gray cast,” Shapiro said. “The black dots and apical spot on the upperside tend to be faint or even to disappear really early in the season.”
The contest rules include:
- It must be an adult (no caterpillars or pupae) and be captured outdoors.
- It must be delivered alive to the department office, 2320 Storer Hall, UC Davis, during work hours, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, with the full data (exact time, date and location of the capture) and your name, address, phone number and/or e-mail. The receptionist will certify that it is alive and refrigerate it. (If you collect it on a weekend or holiday, keep it in a refrigerator; do not freeze. A few days in the fridge will not harm it, Shapiro says.)
- Shapiro is the sole judge.
The list of winners, dates and locations since 2010:
- 2018: Jan. 19: Art Shapiro collected the winner in West Sacramento, Yolo County
- 2017: Jan. 19: Art Shapiro collected the winner on the UC Davis campus
- 2016: Jan. 16: Jacob Montgomery, UC Davis graduate student, collected the winner in west Davis
- 2015: Jan. 26: Shapiro collected the winner in West Sacramento
- 2014: Jan. 14: Shapiro collected the winner in West Sacramento
- 2013: Jan. 21: Shapiro collected the winner in West Sacramento
- 2012: Jan. 8: Shapiro collected the winner in West Sacramento
- 2011: Jan. 31: Shapiro collected the winner in Suisun, Solano County
- 2010: Jan. 27: Shapiro collected the winner in West Sacramento
Shapiro has monitored butterfly population trends on a transect across central California for 46 years and records the information on his research website at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/. His 10 sites stretch from the Sacramento River Delta through the Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada mountains to the high desert of the Western Great Basin. Shapiro visits his sites every two weeks "to record what's out" from spring to fall. The largest and oldest database in North America, it was recently cited by British conservation biologist Chris Thomas in a worldwide study of insect biomass.
Shapiro, a member of the UC Davis faculty since 1971 and author of the book, Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento Valley Regions, has studied a total of 163 species of butterflies in his transect.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
(Embargo lifts at 5 a.m. Pacific Time, July 31, 2018)
There they were--odorant receptor genes, the scent-detecting genes thought to have evolved with winged insects more than 400 million years ago. But this groundbreaking discovery indicates they evolved millions of years earlier.
The sensory gene is considered one of an insect's most important genes, crucial to foraging, mating and avoiding predators.
“It was interesting because a paper published in 2014 claimed that ORs evolved with winged flight and were thus absent in ancestrally wingless (Apterygota) insects,” said Brand, a member of the Population Biology Graduate Group who researches the evolution of olfactory/odorant receptor genes in orchid bees. “Since firebrats are apterygote, we now had proof that this gene family is more ancient than previously thought.”
Brand proposed that they merge their datasets and write a comprehensive paper of higher impact rather than two independent papers. It was a “go.”
The collaborative result: “The Origin of the Odorant Receptor Gene Family in Insects,” a newly published paper by a seven-member team from UC Davis, University of Illinois and the University of Tennessee, in the open-access journal eLife, which prints promising research in the life and medical sciences. The article is online at https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.38340
“Our finding that the odorant receptor gene family evolved at the evolutionary base of the insects makes it a major evolutionary novelty that presumably contributed to the adaptation of early insects to terrestrial living,” Robertson said.
Said Brand: “Odorant receptors are the largest insect gene family underlying the sense of smell. ORs are thus crucial in the majority of behaviors that involve the sense of smell including foraging, reproduction, and detection of predators.” The cell membranes of odorant receptor neurons are key to detecting scents. In insects, the ORs are usually found in the antennae or mouthparts.
In their abstract, the authors wrote that “The origin of the insect odorant receptor (OR) gene family has been hypothesized to have coincided with the evolution of terrestriality in insects. (Christine) Missbach et al. (2014) suggested that ORs instead evolved with an ancestral OR co-receptor (Orco) after the origin of terrestriality and the OR/Orco system is an adaptation to winged flight in insects. We investigated genomes of the Collembola, Diplura, Archaeognatha,
Zygentoma, Odonata, and Ephemeroptera, and find ORs present in all insect genomes butabsent from lineages predating the evolution of insects. Orco is absent only in the ancestrally wingless insect lineage Archaeognatha. Our new genome sequence of the zygentoman firebrat, Thermobia domestica, reveals a full OR/Orco system. We conclude that ORs evolved before winged flight, perhaps as an adaptation to terrestriality, representing a key evolutionary novelty in the ancestor of all insects, and hence a molecular synapomorphy for the Class Insecta.”
Synapomorphy is defined as a characteristic present in an ancestral species and shared exclusively by its evolutionary descendants.
The research is a UC Davis cross-departmental collaboration involving associate professor Brian Johnson of the Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, Wei Lin of the Johnson lab and a member of the Entomology Graduate Group; and Brand, who studies with major professor Santiago Ramirez of the Department of Evolution and Ecology.
“A recurring theme in the field of genomics is that incomplete sampling of the relevant taxa often leads to premature conclusions,” said Johnson. “Our work on ORs is a good example of this.” Johnson studies the genetics, behavior, evolution, and health of honey bees. His lab currently focuses on the evolution and genetic basis of social behavior using comparative and functional genomics.”
The seven-member team, in addition to the UC Davis and University of Illinois scientists, included a trio from the University of Tennessee: Ratnasri Pothula, William Klingeman, and Juan Luis Jurat-Fuentes.
Brand recalled that he detected the multiple odorant receptor genes in the firebrat genome in late January or early February. “I was working at home after my normal work day, because this genome work I did with Brian was a side project for me—he knew of my interest in genomics and offered me the opportunity to collaborate on his lab's ongoing projects.”
Brand expects to receive his doctorate from UC Davis in the spring of 2019. A native of Germany and a former research scientist at Ruhr-University, Bochum, he received his master's degree in genetics and evolutionary biology in 2013 from Ruhr-University, and his bachelor's degree in biology in 2010 from Heinrich-Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Winged insects first appeared on earth 406 million years ago, according to research published in a 2014 edition Science by molecular biodiversity researcher Bernhard Misof, a professor at the University of Bonn, Germany.
Fossil records indicate that hexapods diverged from crustaceans 410 to 510 million years ago, according to Misof. “At this time in geological history, land masses were dotted with shallow inland seas, and plant life (mostly algae and bryophytes) was largely restricted to coastal habitats and other sites where water was readily available,” according to a North Carolina State University's Department of Entomology website. “The oldest hexapod fossils are found in rocks of the late Devonian period. These rocks also contain numerous other terrestrial arthropods (mites, spiders, centipedes, scorpions, etc.) suggesting that a major radiation of terrestrial life-forms must have occurred during the Ordovician or Silurian period.”
The first known fossil record of Apterygota insects, which include firebrats, silverfish and jumping bristletails—dates back to the Devonian period, which began 417 years ago.
The firebrat, found throughout the world under rocks and leaf litter, is an indoor pest of dog food, stored foods, fabric and book bindings. It is commonly found in high-humidity environments such as bakeries and boiler rooms.
According to the UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program (UC IPM), both firebrats and their cousin silverfish “have enzymes in their gut that digest cellulose, and they choose bookcases, closets, and places where books, clothing, starch, or dry foods are available. Silverfish and firebrats are nocturnal and hide during the day. If the object they are hiding beneath is moved, they will dart toward another secluded place. They come out at night to seek food and water. Both insects prefer dry food such as cereals, flour, pasta, and pet food; paper with glue or paste; sizing in paper including wallpaper; book bindings; and starch in clothing. Household dust and debris, dead insects, and certain fungi also are important sources of food. However, they can live for several months without nourishment.”
“Large numbers of these insects can invade new homes from surrounding wild areas, especially as these areas dry out during the summer,” the UC IPM website says. “They also can come in on lumber, wallboard, and similar products. Freshly laid concrete and green lumber supply humidity, while wallpaper paste provides food.”
Resources:
eLife: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.38340
UC IPM Pest Note on Firebrat: http://ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn7475.html
Information on hexapods: https://genent.cals.ncsu.edu/bug-bytes/hexapods/
Philipp Brand website: https://evolvingors.wordpress.com
Contacts:
Philipp Brand: pbrand@ucdavis.edu
Brian Johnson: brnjohnson@ucdavis.edu
Hugh Robertson: hughrobe@uiuc.edu
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The winner of the 2018 Beer-for-a-Butterfly Contest, sponsored by Art Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor of evolution and ecology, is…drumroll…Art Shapiro.
Shapiro collected the cabbage white butterfly, Pieris rapae, at 11:23 a.m. Friday, Jan. 19 in one of his frequented sites—a mustard patch by railroad tracks in West Sacramento, Yolo County. He caught it with his hands--no net.
“Today should not have been the day,” he said, noting the weather forecast of "a chance of rain" when he left his Davis home at 10 a.m. for West Sacramento.
“I spotted the male butterfly dorsal basking (sunbathing) on low vegetation shortly after the first cumulous formed at 11 a.m.,” Shapiro said. “As I approached to collect it, a small cumulus occluded the sun and it closed its wings over its back--allowing me to just pick it up without using my net at all, and drop it into a glassine envelope. It turned out that that was the ONLY cloud that crossed the sun in the next two and a half hours! It got up to about 60 degrees and was a gorgeous day with a trace of a west wind.”
Shapiro said that "It probably emerged an hour or so before I got there so this really is the start of the season! Let the rites of spring begin!”
He described the butterfly as quite yellow instead of white. “Cold weather promotes sepiapterin formation, so early ones are often quite yellow.”
Apparently the newly emerged butterfly had not yet flown. When he placed it in the glassine envelope, “it voided meconium, metabolic wastes of metamorphosis, normally ejected before the first flight.”
Shapiro, who maintains a research website at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu, launched the contest in 1972 as part of his scientific research to record the first flight of the butterfly in the three-county area of Sacramento, Yolo and Solano. He offers a pitcher of the beer, or its equivalent, to the first person who collects the “first of the year” butterfly. It's a contest he usually wins. He has been defeated only four times, and all by UC Davis graduate students.
His former graduate student, Matt Forester, now a professor of biology at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a research collaborator with Shapiro, accurately predicted the first butterfly would be found on Jan. 19.
“Since 1972, the first flight has varied from Jan. 1 to Feb. 22, averaging about Jan. 20,” Shapiro noted.
This is the seventh year the winning butterfly has been collected in Yolo County. Last year Shapiro found the winner on the UC Davis campus; in 2016, graduate student Jacob Montgomery netted the winner outside his home in west Davis, and Shapiro collected all five winners from 2012 to 2015 in West Sacramento.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
DAVIS--Beer for a butterfly.
If you collect the first live cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae) of 2016 within the three-county area of Yolo, Sacramento or Solano and it's verified as the winner, you can win a pitcher of beer or its equivalent from the sponsor, UC Davis professor Art Shapiro.
Shapiro, distinguished professor in the UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology, is sponsoring his annual “Beer for a Butterfly” contest to draw attention to Pieris rapae and its first flight.
The contest, launched in 1972, is all part of Shapiro's four-decade study of climate and butterfly seasonality that he began in 1971. “It is typically one of the first butterflies to emerge in late winter. Since 1972, the first flight has varied from Jan. 1 to Feb. 22, averaging about Jan. 20.”
Shapiro, who is in the field more than 200 days a year, usually wins his own contest because he knows where to look, won the 2015 contest by netting a cabbage white at 12:30 p.m.. Monday, Jan. 26 in West Sacramento, Yolo County. The site: a mustard patch near the railroad tracks.
“It was a very easy catch; I suspect he emerged that morning and that was his first flight.”
Has he seen any lately? “It was flying as of Dec. 22,” he said.
Although the first flight of the cabbage white has been as late as Feb. 22, it is emerging earlier and earlier as the regional climate has warmed, Shapiro said. “There have been only two occasions in the 21st century in which it has come out this late: Jan 26, 2006 and Jan 31, 2011.”
"I do long-term studies of butterfly life cycles and climate," he said. "Such studies are especially important to help us understand biological responses to climate change. The cabbage white is now emerging a week or so earlier on average than it did 30 years ago here."
The professor, fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Entomological Society and the California Academy of Sciences, said the cabbage white butterfly inhabits vacant lots, fields and gardens where its host plants, weedy mustards, grow.
The white butterfly, with black dots on the upperside (which may be faint or not visible in the early season), inhabits vacant lots, fields and gardens where its host plants, weedy mustards, grow.
The male is white. The female is often slightly buffy; the "underside of the hindwing and apex of the forewing may be distinctly yellow and normally have a gray cast,” Shapiro says. “The black dots and apical spot on the upperside tend to be faint or even to disappear really early in the season.”
The contest rules include:
- It must be an adult (no caterpillars or pupae) and be captured outdoors.
- It must be brought in alive to the department office, 2320 Storer Hall, UC Davis, during work hours, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, with the full data (exact time, date and location of the capture) and your name, address, phone number and/or e-mail. The receptionist will certify that it is alive and refrigerate it. (If you collect it on a weekend or holiday, keep it in a refrigerator; do not freeze. A few days in the fridge will not harm it.
- Shapiro is the sole judge.
Shapiro has been defeated only three times since 1972. And all were his graduate students. Adam Porter defeated him in 1983; and Sherri Graves and Rick VanBuskirk each won in the late 1990s.
Shapiro maintains a website on butterflies at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/, where he records the population trends he monitors in Central California. He and artist Tim Manolis co-authored A Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Valley Regions, published in 2007 by the University of California Press.