- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Winokur delivered her presentation on “Thermal Preferences of Aedes aegypti Mosquitoes.”
Her abstract: “Mosquito-borne pathogen transmission models used to inform control decisions are only applicable if we incorporate the temperatures mosquitoes experience. However, mosquito thermal preferences are not well resolved. We studied Aedes aegypti thermal preferences and found that female Ae. aegypti generally avoided temperatures >30°C on a gradient in the lab, and chose relatively cooler microhabitats in the field as ambient temperature increased. Incorporating these preferences could improve the accuracy of transmission models for Ae. aegypti-borne viruses.”
The Hollandsworth Prize memorializes Gerald Hollandsworth, a past president of the West Central Mosquito and Vector Control Association.
A UC Davis alumna, Winokur received her doctorate in entomology, with a designated emphasis in the biology of vector-borne diseases, in November 2022, studying with Professor Barker of the Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, School of Veterinary Medicine.
She delivered her exit seminar, as part of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology weekly seminars, in October on "Temperature Drives Transmission of Mosquito-borne Pathogens: Improving Entomological Estimates for Aedes aegypti-borne Virus Transmission Risk."
"The mosquito Aedes aegypti is the primary vector of a range of viruses that cause a major burden on human health worldwide, including dengue, Zika, chikungunya, and yellow fever viruses," Winokur related in her abstract. "As the Zika epidemic emerged in 2016, estimates for Zika risk were based on proxy evidence from closely related dengue virus. To improve risk estimates, we studied how temperature affects Zika virus extrinsic incubation period. We sought to further improve risk estimates by studying thermal preferences of Ae. aegypti mosquitoes in the laboratory and in the field. Current mosquito-borne pathogen risk models primarily use temperatures from weather stations or thermal imagery as a proxy for the temperatures mosquitoes experience, however such approaches do not account for local environments or microclimates available to adult mosquitoes. Taken together, the results of these studies can be used to improve prediction of mosquito-borne pathogen risk and inform mosquito control decisions." (See information on the mosquito on the California Department of Public Health website)
As a postdoc in the Barker lab, Winokur is working with VectorSurv (https://vectorsurv.org/), and has a fellowship from Pacific Southwest Center of Excellence in Vector-Borne Diseases (https://pacvec.us/), working on "Enriching Practical Learning Resources for Entomological, Medical, and One-Health Curricula."
Olivia received her bachelor's degree in May of 2015 from Cornell University where she was an interdisciplinary studies major (environmental effects on human health). She enrolled in the UC Davis graduate program in 2016.
At UC Davis, Winokur served as the 2019-2020 president of the Entomology Graduate Student Association and as a 2020-2022 committee member of the UC Davis Entomology Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging. She co-founded the Girls' Outdoor Adventure in Leadership and Science (GOALS) in 2017 and continues to serve in leadership roles. GOALS is a free two-week summer science program for high school girls and gender expansive youth from backgrounds underrepresented in STEM fields. They learn science, outdoors skills, and leadership hands-on while backpacking in Sequoia National Park.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
There's still time--and room--to register to attend virtually the New Emeriti Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday, Feb. 15 by UC Davis distinguished professor emeritus Geerat Vermeij, an evolutionary biologist and paleoecologist with the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
Vermeij will speak in-person at 3 p.m. to a capacity crowd in the Putah Creek Lodge on "The Evolution of Power."
Putah Creek Lodge reservations are closed, but folks can watch the seminar virtually on Zoom, announced coordinator Walter Leal, UC Davis distinguished professor of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and former chair of the Department of Entomology and Nematology.
The lecture will be live-streamed on Zoom; registration is underway at https://bit.ly/3BXh0zA.
The program will include a poem by Andy Jones, continuing lecturer in the University Writing Program and a former poet laureate of the city of Davis. Leal also said that some "of our newest emeriti" will be honored.
In a pre-recorded video, Vermeij told Leal: "I'm going to talk about power. And I'm using power in the sense of physics and engineering, that is to say, energy per unit time. All kinds of biological phenomenon can be expressed in terms of power, so for example, productivity, even fitness, the use of force with respect to time and so on. And it turns out that if you think about various biological functions and interactions in terms of power, you rapidly come to see that the most powerful organisms have the greatest effect on their surroundings, in fact, they modify their own surroundings, often to their own benefit."
Vermeij is known for his work on coevolutionary telationships between predator and prey organisms, with a focus on marine mollusks. A native of The Netherlands, he lost his sight to glaucoma at age three, but did not let that deter him. Majoring in biology and geology, he graduated summa cum laudefrom Princeton University in 1968, and obtained his doctorate in biology and geology from Yale University in 1971. In 1992, Vermeij received a MacArthur Fellowship, the “genius” grant, and in 2000, was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. (See The Shape of Life.)
The three-part New Emeriti Distinguished Lecture series "is a platform to celebrate the accomplishments of retiring colleagues,” Leal said last fall. “They have dedicated their lives to laying the foundation for UC Davis to grow into a premiere academic institution. We are very thankful for their contributions to the university's missions and for making UC Davis a better place for us to succeed."
First speaker in the series was UC Davis distinguished professor emeritus Harris Lewin, renowned for his research in comparative mammalian genomics and immunogenetics. He spoke Dec. 7 on “From Chickens to Cows to Everything: Perspectives from 40 Years in Science."
The last speaker in the series is Sharon Strauss, distinguished professor emerita, Department of Evolution and Ecology, College of Biological Sciences. She will speak at 3 p.m. Monday, April 17.
Leal released a “Tribute to Our New Emeriti" video last fall, spotlighting 24 faculty members who retired in 2021-22.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
He participates in his annual “Beer for a Butterfly” contest that he's sponsored since 1972 as part of his scientific research to determine the butterfly's “first” flight of the year — or the first to be witnessed in his contest — in Sacramento, Yolo or Solano counties. The rules: Net the butterfly and win a pitcher of beer or its equivalent. Suds for a bug.
Wednesday (Feb. 8) proved to be a “bingo” day.
He participates in his annual “Beer for a Butterfly” contest that he's sponsored since 1972 as part of his scientific research to determine the butterfly's “first” flight of the year — or the first to be witnessed in his contest — in Sacramento, Yolo or Solano counties. The rules: Net the butterfly and win a pitcher of beer or its equivalent. Suds for a bug.
Wednesday (Feb. 8) proved to be a “bingo” day.
“I knew when I left the house at 10:10 this morning that today would be rapae day,” he announced in an email with the subject line, “Bingo!”
“It was.”
He spotted his first rapae of the year, a female, at 11:22 a.m. in West Sacramento, Yolo County. At 11:38, he saw a male. “Both were typical late winter phenotypes, quite different from what was flying in December,” he noted. “My last in West Sac was Christmas Eve. So the rapae-less hiatus was 45 days, i.e. just over six weeks.”
It was 64 degrees, clear, no wind.
“I did not get a specimen,” Shapiro related. “Both of them were flying up near the railroad track at the top of the railroad embankment, where the ground is strewn with coarse gravel. That makes for a warm layer of air in full sun, but terrible footing. I am no longer so nimble or so self-confident as I used to be, and I never got a clean shot at either bug even though I got within about 6 feet of both.”
“I could have stayed in that area and probably eventually would have caught one or both of them,” Shapiro added. “I had to weigh that against covering the rest of the upland half of my site and possibly finding something else out. Remember that the butterfly-friendly window of time each day is still very short. I opted to keep moving, ultimately observing two atalanta (Vanessa atalanta, the red admiral) but nothing else. Malvella (mallow family) has not broken ground yet. Plenty of Erodium (family Geraniaceae) in bloom now, though.
“So for the day, two species, four bugs.”
The find is now in his records. “Today is the 11th latest first rapae day since 1972,” he said, detailing the 10 later finds, starting with the latest: Feb. 26, 1972 (“which is probably too late, since I hadn't yet learned where to look for them first!”); Feb. 22, 1992 (“I fully believe that one”); Feb. 18, 1978 and 1986; Feb. 17, 1979; Feb. 16, 1975; Feb. 14, 1981; Feb. 13, 1983 and 1985; and Feb. 10, 1980. “Note that most of these are from the '80s,” he said. “There has indeed been a trend to earlier emergence, though this year is an outlier!”
Beer for a Butterfly
“Given how late it is, even though I did not catch a rapae myself, I will offer beer to anyone who does get one and bring it in alive by 5 p.m. this Friday (Feb. 10), and after that declare the contest closed.”
The rules state that the butterfly must be brought in alive to the Department of Evolution and Ecology office, 2320 Storer Hall, 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 the contact information of the collector (address, phone number and/or e-mail.)
P. rapae is emerging earlier and earlier as the regional climate has warmed, said Shapiro, who has monitored the butterfly populations of central California since 1972 and maintains a research website, Art's Butterfly World. It's all part of his long-term studies of butterfly life cycles and climate change. Since 1972, he said, the first flight of the cabbage white butterfly has varied from Jan. 1 to Feb. 26, averaging about Jan. 20.
P. rapae inhabits vacant lots, fields and gardens where its host plants, weedy mustards, grow. In its caterpillar stage, it is a pest commonly called cabbageworm that chews on cole crops.
Shapiro, who is in the field 200 days of the year, has been defeated only four times — and those were by UC Davis graduate students. Adam Porter won in 1983; Sherri Graves and Rick VanBuskirk each won in the late 1990s; and Jacob Montgomery in 2016. The first three were his own graduate students.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Their work, “Insect Herbivory Within Modern Forests Is Greater than Fossil Localities,” appears in the Oct. 10th edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The first-of-its-kind study compares insect herbivore damage of modern-era plants with that of fossilized leaves dating as far back as 67 million years ago.
“Our work bridges the gap between those who use fossils to study plant-insect interactions over deep time and those who study such interactions in a modern context with fresh leaf material,” said lead researcher and ecologist Lauren Azevedo-Schmidt, formerly of the Department of Biology, University of Wyoming and now a postdoctoral research associate with the Climate Change Institute, University of Maine. “The difference in insect damage between the modern era and the fossilized record is striking.”
No stranger to UC Davis, Currano presented a UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology seminar, hosted by Meineke, on "Ancient Bug-Bitten Leaves Reveal the Impacts of Climate and Plant Nutrients on Insect Herbivores" on April 28, 2021.
“Plants and insects are the most diverse lineages on earth, but their interactions in the face of climate and other global changes are poorly understood…despite insect declines, insect damage to plants is elevated in the modern era compared with other time periods represented in the fossil record,” they wrote. “Plants today are experiencing unprecedented levels of insect herbivory, with unknown consequences for plant fitness and evolution.”
The scientists presented estimates for damage frequencies and diversities on fossil leaves from the Late Cretaceous (66.8 million years ago) through the Pleistocene (2.06 million years ago) and compared these estimates with recent (post-1955) leaves collected via paleobotanical methods from three modern ecosystems, including Harvest Forest, a 3000-acre ecological research area in managed by Harvard University and located in Petersham, Mass. The site, in operation since 1907, is one of North America's oldest managed forests.
Other ecosystems: the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) of Chesapeake Bay, a 2,650-acre campus spanning forests, wetlands, marshes and 15 miles of protected shoreline, and the 3953-acre La Selva Research Station, Costa Rica, a private forest reserve.
The scientists advocate more research to determine the precise causes of increased insect damage to plants, but related that a “warming climate, urbanization and introduction of invasive species likely have had a major impact.”
“We hypothesize that humans have influenced (insect) damage frequencies and diversities within modern forests, with the most human impact occurring after the Industrial Revolution,” the researchers wrote. “Consistent with this hypothesis, herbarium specimens from the early 2000s were 23 percent more likely to have insect damage than specimens collected in the early 1900s, a pattern that has been linked to climate warming.”
“This research suggests that the strength of human influence on plant-insect interactions is not controlled by climate change alone but, rather, the way in which humans interact with the terrestrial landscape,” the researchers concluded.
Meineke, who joined the UC Davis faculty in 2020, served as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University Herbaria from 2016 to 2019, including a National Science Foundation-sponsored fellowship there in 2017. She holds a doctorate in entomology from North Carolina State University (2016), Raleigh, where she wrote her dissertation on “Understanding the Consequences of Urban Warming for Street Trees and Their Pests.”
Meineke helped spearhead the newly created Harvard Museum of Natural History's “In Search of Thoreau's Flowers: An Exploration of Change and Loss," hailed as an examination of the natural world and climate change at the intersections of science, art and history. The exhibit opened to the public May 14, 2022.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The seminar, to be both in-person and virtual, is scheduled from 4:10 to 5 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 28 in 122 Briggs Hall. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672.
"In winter, honey bees undergo a transition to a diutinus state, during which time brood rearing declines or stops entirely, and worker bees live for up to 20 weeks," Coit says in her abstract. "The mechanism, causes, and geographic prevalence of this transition are unknown, and can make managing honey bees in certain regions challenging. We hypothesized that the transition to overwintering is regulated by the forager pheromone, ethyl oleate, when forager bees are relegated to the hive for longer periods of time during poor weather conditions. We exposed bees of different ages and tasks to ethyl oleate and measured accepted markers of overwintering. Our findings indicate ethyl oleate may affect the efficiency of metabolism of protein into fat stores, allowing young bees to prepare for suboptimal conditions. Ethyl oleate, when concomitant with other factors such as gradual decline in brood pheromone, pollen dearth, cold temperatures, and photoperiod, may contribute to the transition to overwintering."
Coit, who grew up around Asheville, N.C., holds a bachelor of science degree in biology (2019) from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill.
She received her master's degree from UC Davis on Sept. 9, and is currently working and living in Vermont. "I work at Sterling College, where I am teaching entomology, ecology, biology, and apiculture in the undergraduate program, as well as developing course materials for the continuing education department in a variety of subjects such as water management, agroecology, pest management, and sustainable agriculture and food systems."
Her biography on the Niño website includes: "She was founder and president of the Carolina Beekeeping Club, whose efforts recently succeeded in making UNC, a Bee Campus USA. She first became interested in honey bees in high school while taking a summer class at Cornell. In college, she began volunteering at the NC State University Honey Bee Research Laboratory to gain more experience with bees. Since then, she has also worked at NC State as a research technician and conducted her own research on pheromone variation of brood and queens among different stocks of bees."
Coit studied abroad at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, in 2017, from July to November.
Emily Meineke, assistant professor of urban landscape entomology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, coordinates the department's seminars for the 2022-23 academic year. All 11 seminars will take place both person and virtually at 4:10 p.m. on Wednesdays in Room 122 of Briggs Hall except for the Nov. 9th and Dec. 7th seminars, which will be virtual only, she said. (See list of seminars)
For further information on the seminars or technical difficulties with Zoom, contact Meineke at ekmeineke@ucdavis.edu.