- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
By popular vote, "Little Swimmers and Fly Tyers (Briggs Hall)," won the category, Hidden Treasures; and "Real Insects and Mimics (Bohart Museum of Entomology)" won the category "Family Friendly."
"Little Swimmers" featured an aquatic insect display from Professor Sharon Lawler's lab, while "Fly Tyers" was the work of the Fly Fishers of Davis, headed by president Dana Hooper and vice president Paul Berliner.
Coordinating the Bohart Museum Picnic Day exhibit were Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum; Tabatha Yang, public outreach and education; and Steve Heydon, senior museum scientist.
Chairing the Briggs Hall Picnic Day Committee were forensic entomologist Robert Kimsey of the faculty and doctoral candidate Danny Klittich, representing the Entomology Graduate Student Association (EGSA). Kimsey also serves as the EGSA advisor. The Briggs Hall sub-committee chairs included:
- Erin Donely-Marineau - Registration
- Joanna Bloese and Brendon Boudinot - Maggot Art
- Stephanie Kurniawan - Medical Entomology
- Elina Niño - Honey Tasting and Apiculture
- Margaret "Rei" Scampavia - Pollinator Pavilion
- Jackson Audley and Corwin Parker - Forestry Entomology
- Bob Kimsey - Collecting Equipment and Dr. Death
- Cindy Preto - EGSA T-Shirts
- Sharon Lawler - Little Swimmers
- Ralph Washington Jr. - Bug Doctor
- Arachnids - Jeff Smith and Ziad Khouri
- Bumble Bees - Robbin Thorp
- Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches - Nicole Tam
- Thorny Walking Sticks- Patrik Barcelos
- Tomato Hornworms - Laurie Casebier
- Australian Walking Sticks - Charlotte Herbert
- Tardigrade Display - Angel of Love "Lovey" Corniel and Tabatha Yang
- Mimicry Displays - Steve Heydon and Tabatha Yang
- Gift Shop - Ivani Li
The UC Davis Entomology Club entered a giant black widow float in the Picnic Parade. Taking the lead were Maia Lundy, president, and Marko Marrero, past president. Jamie Fong and Lovey Corniel led the baking for the entomophagy bake sale. Visitors purchased cricket-flour cookies and other goodies at a table in front of Briggs.
Scores of Entomology Club members participated in Picnic Day. Andre Poon and Stacey Lee Rice designed the club T-shirts, with ordering and selling overseen by Sydney Morrill and Tom Nguyen. Nguyen and Lundy also coordinated the tabling and face painting. Among the volunteers:
Face Painting: Jim Shen, Ushrayinee Sarker, Karissa Merritt, Maia Lundy, Jessica Nguyen, Marko Marrero, Stacey Lee Rice, Miriam Nansen, Ann Kao and Tom Nguyen
Baking: Jamie Fong, Lovey Corniel, Mary Corniel, Jessie Liu, Keith Wong, John So, Qiming Yang, Andre Poon, James Heydon
Tabling: Tom Nguyen, Qiming Yang, Andre Poon, Chloe Shott, Keith Wong, Darian Dungey, Jessie Liu and John So
Parade: Jamie Fong, Val Fong, Marko Marrero, Alex Nguyen, Ben Maples, Chloe Shott, Andre Poon, Qiming Yang, Maia Lundy, Jade Lundy, James Heydon, lovey Corniel, Mary Corniel, Massiel Melendez, Sydney Morrill, Andy Yu, Farian Dungey, Ushrayinee Sarker, Stacey Lee Rice and Kyle Leong.
(Editor's Note: Below are photos from the award-winning exhibits. For more photos from Picnic Day, see the Department of Entomology and Nematology's Flickr page.)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
DAVIS--The UC Davis Linnaean Games Team, the reigning national and regional champions, won the 2016 games conducted Monday night, April 4 in Honolulu at the annual meeting of the Pacific Branch of the Entomological Society of America (PBESA)
The team, comprised of captain Ralph Washington Jr., and members Brendon Boudinot, Jessica Gillung and Ziad Khouri, defeated the University of Hawaii in the semi-finals and then went on to nail the championship with a victory over the UC Riverside team.
The Linnaean Games is a college-bowl type competition in which teams answer questions about insects and entomologists. The teams hold practice sessions throughout the year.
Washington is studying for his doctorate with major professors Steve Nadler and Brian Johnson, who respectively specialize in systematics and evolutionary biology of nematodes and the evolution, behavior, genetics, and health of honeybees; Boudinot with major professor Phil Ward, systematics and evolutionary biology of ants; and Jessica Gillung and Ziad Khouri with major professor Lynn Kimsey, who specializes in the biology and evolution of insects. Kimsey directs the Bohart Museum of Entomology.
The Pacific Branch of ESA encompasses 11 U.S. states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming); several U.S. territories, including American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands; and parts of Canada and Mexico.
The national Linnaean Games will take place at the ESA's meeting, set Sept. 25-30 in Orlando, Fla. It is being held in conjunction with the International Congress of Entomology (ICE). More than 7000 entomologists from throughout the world are expected to attend. The ICE meeting is co-chaired by UC Davis chemical ecologist Walter Leal, professor, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and research entomologist Alvin M. Simmons of the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service, Charleston, S.C.
- Question: According to the experiment performed at UCB in 1991, the fastest land insect in the world registered a record speed of 1.5 m/s or 3.36 mph, which was equal to 50 body lengths per second. Name the insect.
Answer: American Cockroach, Periplanetaamericana - Question: According to Alder and Willis (2003), in the history of arthropod borne disease in South Carolina, which insect vectored human disease is known by the names Aigue Fever, Bilious Fever, Country Fever, Intermittent Fever, Remittent Fever, and Tertian Fever?
Answer: Malaria - Question:What animal was imported to Mauritius from India in the 18th century to control the Red Locust, Nomadacris
semptemfasiciata?
Answer: The Mynah Bird - Question: What is the active ingredient in the insecticidal product known as NEEM?
Answer: Azadiracthin - Question: In systematics, what is the term for a group containing a common ancestor and some but not all of its descendants?
Answer: A paraphyletic group
Related Link:
UC Davis Wins National Championship
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
DAVIS--They're the national champs!
The UC Davis Linnaean Games Team, comprised of four graduate students in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, won the National Linnaean Games Championship at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Entomological Association of America (ESA), held recently in Minneapolis. See YouTube video at https://youtu.be/_hA05K0NET4.
They did so by correctly answering such questions as:
“What is the smallest insect that is not a parasite or parasitoid?”
“Nicrophorus americanus is listed under what legislative act?” and
“What are the three primary conditions that define eusociality?”
The UC Davis team defeated powerhouse University of Florida 130 to 70 to win its first-ever national championship in the 32-year history of the ESA's Linnaean Team Games.
The Davis team is comprised of captain Ralph Washington Jr., and members Brendon Boudinot, Jessica Gillung and Ziad Khouri, and is advised by faculty members Larry Godfrey, Extension entomologist, and Elina Niño, Extension apiculturist.
The Linnaean Games is a college-bowl type competition in which teams answer questions about insects and entomologists. The teams hold practice sessions throughout the year.
The UC Davis Linnaean Games Team earlier won the regional competition hosted by the Pacific Branch of ESA. They defeated Washington State University in the finals. Both teams competed at the nationals.
Washington is studying for his doctorate with major professors Steve Nadler and Brian Johnson, who respectively specialize in systematics and evolutionary biology of nematodes and the evolution, behavior, genetics, and health of honeybees; Boudinot with major professor Phil Ward, systematics and evolutionary biology of ants; and Jessica Gillung and Ziad Khouri with major professor Lynn Kimsey, who specializes in the biology and evolution of insects. Kimsey directs the Bohart Museum of Entomology.
“They played well and obviously studied hard,” said Gamesmaster Deane Jorgenson, who chaired the event and asked the questions. She is a research scientist at Syngenta, Burnsville, Minn.
Toss-Up Question: What is the smallest insect that is not a parasite or parasitoid?
Answer: Beetles in the family Ptiliidae.
Bonus Question:Some species of mosquitoes lay eggs that can undergo diapause or aestivation. Give at least three cues that trigger the aquatic eggs to hatch.
Answer: Temperature, immersion in water, concentration of ions or dissolved solutes.
Toss-Up Question: Chikungunya is an emerging vector-borne disease in the Americas. Chikungunya is derived from the African Language Makonde. What means Chikungunya in Makonde?
Answer: Bending up.
Toss-Up Question: A Gilson's gland can be found in what insect order?
Answer: Trichoptera
Toss-Up Question: Certain Chrysomelid larvae carry their feces as a defensive shield. To what subfamily do these beetles belong?
Answer: Cassidinae.
Bonus Question: The first lepidopteran sex pheromone identified was bombykol. What was the first dipteran sex pheromone identified? Give the trade or chemical name.
Answer: Muscalure, Z-9-Tricosene. It is also one of the chemicals released by bees during the waggle dance.
Toss-Up Question: What famous recessive gene was the first sex-linked mutation demonstrated in Drosophila by T.H. Morgan?
Answer: White
Bonus Question: Cecidomyiidae are known as the gall flies. What is unique about the species Mayetiola destructor, and what is its common name?
Answer: Mayetiola destructor is the Hessian Fly, a tremendous pest of wheat. It does not form galls.
Toss-Up Question: Nicrophorus americanus is listed under what legislative act?
Answer: The Endangered Species Act
Toss-Up Question: In what insect order would you find hemelytra?
Answer: The order Hemiptera.
Toss-Up Question: The subimago stage is characteristic of what insect order?
Answer: The order Ephemeroptera
Bonus Question: A 2006 Science article by Glenner et al. on the origin of insects summarized evidence that Hexapods are nothing more than land-dwelling crustaceans, which is to say that the former group Crustacea is paraphyletic with respect to the Hexapoda. What hierarchical name has been used to refer to this clade?
Answer: Pancrustacea
Toss-Up Question: What are the three primary conditions that define eusociality?
Answer: Cooperative brood care, overlapping generations, and reproductive division of labor
A total of 10 teams competed in the 2015 Linnaean Games:
- Eastern Branch: Virginia Tech University and University of Maryland
- North Central Branch: Michigan State University and Purdue University
- Pacific Branch: UC Davis and Washington State University
- Southeastern Branch: University of Georgia and University of Florida
- Southwestern Branch: Oklahoma State University and Texas A&M
A YouTube video of the championship game will be posted soon. Last year North Carolina State University defeated the University of Florida to win the finals. The 2014 championship game is online at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA9TsFFmQBE&feature=youtu.be
Related Links:
National Championship on YouTube
Origin of Linnaean Games (Richard Levine in American Entomologist)
Previous Winners (Entomological Society of America)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
DAVIS--Graduate students Ralph Washington Jr. and Christopher Pagan, both of the Steve Nadler lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, are among the recipients of the prestigious National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Program (NSF GRFP) Fellowship Awards. They were among 2,050 recipients selected from a national pool of 16,500 applications.
The awards are designed to “ensure the nation's leadership in advancing science and engineering research and innovation,” according to Maria Zacharias of NSF. Since 1952, NSF has provided fellowships to individuals based on their demonstrated potential for significant achievements in science and engineering. (See list of 2015 recipients)
Washington and Pagan are both first-year graduate students seeking their doctoral degrees. The GRFP provides three years of financial support within a five-year fellowship period ($34,000 annual stipend and $12,000 cost-of-education allowance to the graduate institution) for graduate study that leads to a research-based master's or doctoral degree in science or engineering.
Washington, who studies mosquitoes, and Pagan, who studies nematodes, won in the same GRFP category and subcategory, Life Sciences, Systematics and Biodiversity.
They credit Professor Nadler with encouraging them to apply for fellowship awards, “coaxing us to tell the story we wanted to communicate and then reviewing our proposals.” Through Nadler's encouragement leadership, they were accepted for enrollment in a six-week UC Davis ecology seminar last year. In a rarity, 11 of the 36 students in the UC Davis seminar received National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Awards. It is even rarer for two graduate students in the same lab to receive the honor.
Washington, the newly elected president of the UC Davis Graduate Student Association and a recent recipient of the McNair Graduate Fellowship Award, studies mosquito evolution and ecology, focusing on “how mosquitoes choose to lay their eggs, and how those choices affect their evolution.” He received his bachelor of science degree in entomology from UC Davis in 2010.
Active in the Entomological Society of America (ESA), Washington captains the UC Davis Linnaean Team that recently won the Pacific Branch of ESA championship. The three-member team, also including Jéssica Gillung, and Brendon Boudinot, will now compete at the nationals in Minnesota in November. The Linnaean Games are college-bowl like games centering on entomological facts, trivia and entomologists. Washington served as a member of the UC Davis Linnaean Team that competed in the ESA nationals in 2010. He was also a member of the UC Davis Debate Team that won the ESA national championship in 2014. In addition to his studies and leadership activities, he serves as a volunteer at the Bohart Museum of Entomology.
Pagan received his bachelor's degree in 2003 in biochemistry and molecular biology from UC Davis. “I study nematodes, the most common creature that most people know virtually nothing about,” said Pagan, who plans a career in agricultural nematology. “It is the most abundant multicellular animal on the planet. Some 26,000 nematodes have been described. In comparison, there are 35,000 species of fish.”
Pagan's research involves the molecular systematics and biodiversity of nematodes, specifically, ecology of soil nematodes. Pagan worked as a lab technician in the Nadler lab for eight years, and also worked with nematologist Valerie Williamson for two years in the Department of Plant Pathology.
Pagan enjoys teaching youngsters in the education outreach program, Kids Into Discovering Science (KIDS) . He recently taught three fifth-grade classes at the KIDS program in Lower Lake, Calif.
Among the 2,000 GRFP awardees, 1,053 are women, 494 are from underrepresented minority groups, 43 are persons with disabilities, and 31 are veterans. Nearly 500 institutions are represented.
A high priority for NSF and GRFP is increasing the diversity of the science and engineering workforce, including geographic distribution and the participation of women, underrepresented minorities, persons with disabilities, and veterans. With its emphasis on support of individuals, GRFP offers fellowship awards directly to graduate students selected through a national competition.
NSF is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering.The purpose of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program is to “help ensure the vitality and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States,” according to its website. “The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees in science and engineering. The GRFP provides three years of support for the graduate education of individuals who have demonstrated their potential for significant achievements in science and engineering.”
Four UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology graduate students received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowships in 2011:
- Matan Shelomi, who studied with major professor, Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology. Shelomi is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany.
- Kelly Hamby of the Frank Zalom lab, who is now an assistant professor of sustainable agroecosystems and an Extension specialist in the Department of Entomology, University of Maryland, College Park
- Irina Shapiro of the Ed Lewis lab, who is now a research and development specialist at the Bayer CropScience Biologics, Sacramento.
- Katharina Ullmann of the Neal Williams lab, who is now a pollination ecologist with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
Related Links:
2011 NSF Graduate Research Fellowships (UC Davis)
2015 Graduate Research Fellowships, All
General Information about the Awards
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Those were two of the questions asked of the three-member team from the Department of Entomology and Nematology, University of California, Davis, when they competed in the Linnaean Games at the Pacific Branch of the Entomological Society of America's recent meeting in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.
They not only answered those questions correctly but went on to win the branch championship. The UC Davis team--comprised of captain Ralph Washington, Jr., and members Jéssica Gillung, and Brendon Boudinot-- will now compete in November at the national Linnaean Games hosted by the Entomological Society of America (ESA) in Minneapolis.
What's the answer to “What insect family can vector anthrax?” Tabanidae.
What caste of honey bee has the greatest number of ommatidia? The drone, the male honey bee. Ommatidia are the subunits of a compound eye.
The Linnaean Games, named for Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), the father of modern taxonomy, are college bowl-style competitions involving insect science, including entomological facts, insect trivia and noted entomologists. The lively question-and-answer competitions are “an important and entertaining component of the ESA annual meeting,” said Richard Levine, ESA communications program manager.
The university-sponsored student teams, comprised of graduate students and occasionally undergraduate students, challenge one another at the annual ESA branch meetings for the championship and bragging rights. Each ESA branch then funds the champion team to compete in the national Linnaean Games. The runner-up team from each branch also competes in the nationals.
At the Pacific Branch meeting, UC Davis defeated Washington State University (WSU), Pullman, Wash., 125-60 in the finals to win the championship. WSU earlier defeated Utah State University, 80-40, and UC Davis defeated USU 170-30.
The UC Davis team, advised by Extension entomologist Larry Godfrey and Extension apiculturist Elina Lastro Niño. began practicing last December and met two hours a week.
As an undergraduate student, Ralph Washington Jr. helped anchor the UC Davis 2010 team that competed in the nationals in San Diego. UC Davis narrowly lost to Ohio State University, which advanced to the finals and then went on to win the championship.
Washington, Gillung and Boudinot are all systematists. Washington, whose major professor is nematologist Steve Nadler, studies mosquitoes; Boudinot studies ants with major professor Phil Ward, and Gillung studies flies with major professor Lynn Kimsey, who directs the Bohart Museum of Entomology. Gillung is co-advised by Shaun Winterton of the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
Washington, a first-year doctoral student from Sacramento, Calif., and the newly elected president of the UC Davis Graduate Student Association, focuses on how mosquitoes choose to lay their eggs, and how those choices affect their evolution.
Boudinot, a second-year doctoral student from Washington state, is known for his expertise on the morphology of male ants. He is also interested in the biogeography and evolutionary history of ants.
Jessica, a second-year doctoral student from Brazil, is a prominent taxonomist of Diptera (flies), with special emphasis on the diversity and evolution of spider flies, family Acroceridae. Some Acrocerid adults are specialized pollinators, while larvae are internal parasitoids of spiders.
The trio is eagerly looking forward to making the 1900-mile trip from Davis to Minneapolis. Theme of the meeting is “Synergy in Science: Partnering for Solutions.” It will take place Nov. 15-18.
The Pacific Branch of ESA encompasses 11 U.S. states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming); several U.S. territories, including American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands; and parts of Canada and Mexico.