One of the outcomes of teaching a general entomology course to undergraduates for many, many years is that I have taken on a new appreciation for science fiction and fantasy. This happens, in part, because every year, a student makes some new scientific discovery about an insect that causes me to slap my forehead and say “They do what!?” The other part is how little students (or the public in general) know about insects, in contrast to how much they think they know. Most of my students are not entomology majors, and many aren't even majors in the biological sciences, so there are a lot of misconceptions. Nonetheless, there is huge entertainment in enlightenment.

So begins an article in the current edition of the American Entomologist by Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

Kimsey details how teaching a course in general entomology can be both eye-opening and entertaining. Some of the sentences that the students wrote on their papers appear in the Bohart Museum's 2019 calendar, complete with illustrations by graphic artist and undergraduate entomology student, Karissa Merritt. 

For the article, Kimsey divides choice sentences into categories, including social insects, agricultural pests, mosquitoes and medical entomology, aquatic insects, butterflies and "sundry."

A few examples:

Social Insects:

• Honeybees were able to find their way home by navigating around the sun.
  
  
• Because the males in the Hymenoptera social structure do no work, they are considered a waste of the colony's energy, and as such, they are only laid when the colony can stand the strain.

Agricultural Pests:

• Normally, locusts are introverted creatures; they do not socialize unless it is for reproduction

Mosquitoes and Medical Entomology:

• 300,000 to 500,000 new cases [of malaria] occur annually, of which 2.7 million are fatal.
  
  
• Aerial spraying should be done as a last resort since this leads to mosquito resistance, affects American lobsters and human health.
  
  
• The infected fleas can harbor rats, ground squirrels, rabbits, and occasionally, even house cats.

Aquatic Insects:

• Water bodies are usually slow moving and narrow so that they may burrow, crawl along the bottom and climb vegetation.

Butterflies:

• Although caterpillars are vulnerable and young, their ability to protect against predators has helped them become successful predators.

Sundry:

• However, at the end of the day, a pit-building antlion is a fat sack of poop that lies motionless at the bottom of a hole waiting for food to fall directly into its jaws, and that's a lifestyle I fully endorse.
  
  
• Some West African tribes are known to be very fond of certain insects, although sometimes more with the children.

Kimsey concluded: "I can't wait for next year to learn more about new things that insects do and how they do them. Through all of this, I'm hoping to create the next generation of entomologists, while teaching them how to write and continuing to collect more wonderful sentences."

The American Entomologist is a publication of the 7000-member Entomological Society of America (ESA), the world's largest entomological organization serving the professional and scientific needs of entomologists and others in related disciplines.

Kimsey, who received both her undergraduate degree (1975) and her doctorate (1979) from UC Davis, joined the entomology faculty in 1989. The director of the Bohart Museum and executive director of the Bohart Museum Society since 1990, she has also served as interim chair and vice chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, now the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

Kimsey won the UC Davis Academic Senate's Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award in 2016. The annual award  recognizes a faculty member's significant public service contributions that benefit the local, regional, national, and/or international community.

She twice served as president of the International Society of Hymenopterists, and is a former board member of the Natural Science Collections Alliance. She  is active in ESA and the Washington Entomological Society. The Pacific Branch of ESA (PBESA) honored her and colleagues Eric Mussen, Robbin Thorp, Neal Williams and Brian Johnson—“the UC Davis Bee Team”--with the outstanding team award in 2013. Kimsey also received the PBESA Systematics, Evolution and Biodiversity Award in 2014.

Hats off to the 12 members of the Graduating Class of 2019, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

They received their degrees at an afternoon ceremony on Sunday, June 16 in The Pavilion, sharing the ceremony with other graduating students from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CA&ES). CA&ES held two commencement ceremonies; one in the morning at 9 and one in the afternoon at 2.

Dean Helene Dillard and Chancellor Gary May both delivered speeches. It was a day "filled with commencement regalia, beaming smiles and other memories that will last a lifetime," May recalled on a UC Davis website.

The entomology graduates (UC Davis does not offer a major in nematology  but does offer a minor) are:

• Darian Buckman
• Abram Estrada
• Lohitashwa Garikipati
• Rayanh Gutierrez
• Jo Hsuan Kao
• Eliza Litsey
• Jessica Nguyen
• Dingyuan Peng
• Jesus Martinez Rodriguez
• Matthew Salvador
• Michelle Tam
• Seiji Yokota

 CA&ES was the only college or school holding two ceremonies to accommodate the graduating students.  The others ceremonies:

• School of Medicine — 10 a.m. Friday, May 17, Mondavi Center
• School of Law — 11 a.m. Saturday, May 18, Mondavi Center
• School of Veterinary Medicine — 3:30 p.m Friday, May 24, Mondavi Center
• School of Education — 4 p.m. Wednesday, June 12, Mondavi Center
• Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing — 10 a.m. Thursday, June 13, Mondavi Center
• Graduate Studies — 3 p.m. Thursday, June 13, The Pavilion
• College of Biological Sciences — 9 a.m. Friday, June 14, The Pavilion
• College of Engineering — 2 p.m. Friday, June 14, The Pavilion
• College of Letters and Science — 9 a.m., and 2 and 7 p.m. Saturday, June 15, The Pavilion
• Graduate School of Management — 10 a.m. Saturday, June 15, Mondavi Center

Size does matter, but how much? Enough to unravel a complex evolution of sexual size dimorphism?

Female golden orbweavers--tropical spiders known for weaving golden-hued webs as wide as five feet in diameter--are sometimes 10 times larger and 100 times heavier than their male counterparts, says Jason Bond, professor and Schlinger Chair in Insect Systematics, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. And notoriously, the huge females cannibalize the tiny males.

“Sexual size dimorphism (SSD) often seems to be correlated with extreme morphological, behavioral and life history phenotypes in either sex,” says Bond, senior author of a newly published paper in the Journal of Systematic Biology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society of Systematic Biologists.

Through phylogenomic (the intersection of the fields of evolution and genomics) and comparative analyses, Bond and his colleagues found that golden orbweavers “ignore biological rules.”

The global team of 11 scientists--from Slovenia, China, Taiwan, Czech Republic and the United States (UC Davis, Smithsonian Institution, University of Idaho, University of Florida and University of Vermont)--unraveled a complex evolution of sexual size and dimorphism and found that Nephilid female gigantism is a “phylogenetically ancient phenotype, over 100 million years old, though their magnitudes vary by lineage.”

The spiders belong to the genus Nephila and family Nephilidae; the members are known for constructing huge or exaggerated webs. The species thrive in warmer regions throughout the world, including Australia, Asia, Africa (including Madagascar) and the America. One species, N. clavipes, is found in southern United States, from Texas to North Carolina.

For the paper, “Golden Orbweavers Ignore Biological Rules: Phylogenomic and Comparative Analyses Unravel a Complex Evolution of Sexual Size Dimorphism,” the team tested two biological rules: Cope's rule and Rensch's rule. Cope's rule postulates that population lineages tend to increase in body size over evolutionary time. Rensch's rule is a biological rule on allometric patterns of male and female size. Neither rule applied to the golden orbweavers.

First, the scientists established the backbone phylogeny of Nephilidae, using 367 anchored hybrid enrichment markers, and then combined these data with classical markers for a reference species level phylogeny.

“Second, we used the phylogeny to test Cope and Rensch's rules, sex specific size optima, and the coevolution of web size, type, and features with female and male body size and their ratio, SSD,” they wrote in their abstract. “Male, but not female, size increases significantly over time, and refutes Cope's rule. Allometric analyses reject the converse, Rensch's rule. Male and female body sizes are uncorrelated. Female size evolution is random, but males evolve toward an optimum size (3.2–4.9 mm). Overall, female body size correlates positively with absolute web size. However, intermediate-sized females build the largest webs (of the hybrid type), giant female Nephila and Trichonephila build smaller webs (of the aerial type), and the smallest females build the smallest webs (of the arboricolous type).”

In conclusion, the scientists proposed a new clade, a group of organisms evolving from a common ancestor. They resurrected the family Nephilidae and proposed the new clade, Orbipurae, to contain Araneidae Clerck 1757, Phonognathidae Simon 1894, new rank, and Nephilidae.

The researchers proposed “taxonomic changes based on the criteria of clade age, monophyly and exclusivity, classification information content, and diagnosability. Spider families, as currently defined, tend to be between 37 million years old and 98 million years old, and Nephilidae is estimated at 133 million years old, thus deserving family status.”

“Nephilid female gigantism is a phylogenetically ancient phenotype (over 100 million years old), as is extreme sexual size dimorphism, though their magnitudes vary by lineage,” they wrote. “Despite the sometimes conflicting trends seen within Nephilidae, the clade stands as the most extreme example of female-biased SSD among terrestrial animals, as far as we know.”

The Jason Bond lab and the Chris Hamilton lab, Department of Entomology, Plant Pathology and Nematology at the University of Idaho, Moscow, provided the anchored hybrid enrichment data and phylogenomic analysis.

Co-authors of the paper, in addition to Bond and Hamilton, are

• Matjaž Kuntner of the National Institute of Biology, Ljubljana, Slovenia; the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; and Hubei University, China;
• Ren-Chung Cheng, Biological Institute ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan;
• Matjaž Gregorič, Nik Lupše and Tjaša Lokovšek, all with the Biological Institute ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana,Slovenia (Lupse is also affiliated with the Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic);
• Emily Moriatry Lemmon and Alan Lemmon, Florida State University, Tallahassee;
• Ingi Agnarsson of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution; and University of Vermont, Burlington; and
• Jonathan Coddington, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.

The research drew funds from Slovenian Research Agency grants, from the U.S. State Department through a Fulbright visiting scholar; ZRZ Director's Fund, National Science Foundation, Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant and funds from Auburn University, Alabama. Bond joined the UC Davis faculty in July of 2018 from Auburn University after a seven-year academic career there, where he served as professor of biology and chaired the Department of Biological Sciences. He also curated the arachnids and myriapods (centipedes, millipedes, and related animals) at the Auburn University Museum of Natural History.

Bruce Hammock, UC Davis distinguished professor (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

(Embargo lifts at 1 p.m., June 17. See online paper)

Cancer research published by a team of scientists, including the Bruce Hammock laboratory, University of California, Davis, has been named the Journal of Clinical Investigation's Editor's Pick for the month of July.

Scientists from UC Davis and Harvard Medical School co-authored the paper on how blocking inflammation and/or activating the resolution of inflammation before surgery or chemotherapy can eradicate small tumors and promote long-term survival in experimental animal cancer models.

The paper, “Preoperative Stimulation of Resolution and Inflammation Blockade Eradicates Micrometastases,” available online beginning June 17, combines the expertise of Professor Bruce Hammock and researcher Jun Yang of UC Davis with that of the Harvard Medical School team led by Dipak Panigrahy and Allison Gartung; Professor Vikas Sukhatme from Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta; and Professor Charles Serhan from Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School.

“During chemotherapy or surgery, dying cancer cells can trigger inflammation and the growth of microscopic cancerous cells,” said Hammock, a distinguished professor who holds a joint appointment with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Panigrahy described cancer therapy "as a double-edged sword, as surgery and chemotherapy can induce an inflammatory/immunosuppressive injury response that promotes dormancy escape and tumor recurrence. We hypothesized that these events could be altered by early blockade of the inflammatory cascade and/or by accelerating the resolution of inflammation.”

The researchers, in studying new therapeutic approaches to overcome the tumor-promoting capability of surgery, utilized a well-established animal model in which tumor dormancy escape and the outgrowth of lung metastases is triggered by primary tumor resection.

“We found that preoperative, but not postoperative, administration of the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug ketorolac and/or resolvins, a family of specialized pro-resolving autacoid mediators, eliminated micrometastases in multiple tumor-resection models, resulting in long-term survival,”  Gartung said. “Moreover, we found that ketorolac and resolvins exhibited synergistic anti-tumor activity and prevented surgery or chemotherapy-induced tumor dormancy escape in our animal models.”

Serhan explained that “Ketorolac unleashed anti-cancer T-cell immunity that was augmented by immune checkpoint blockade, negated by adjuvant chemotherapy, and dependent on inhibition of the COX-1/thromboxane A2 (TXA₂) pathway. Pre-operative stimulation of inflammation resolution via resolvins (RvD2, RvD3, and RvD4) inhibited metastases and induced T cell responses.”

 “Collectively, our findings suggest a paradigm shift in clinical approaches to resectable cancers," said Sukhatme. "Simultaneously blocking the ensuing pro-inflammatory response and activating endogenous resolution programs before surgery may eliminate micrometastases and reduce tumor recurrence."

This novel approach of blocking inflammation and/or accelerating the resolution of inflammation before a surgical procedure also holds promise for patients who do not have cancer. “More than 30 percent of healthy individuals harbor microscopic cancers," Panigraphy said. "Non-cancer surgery and anesthesia may promote the growth of existing micro-tumors."

Co-authors include:

• Dipak Panigrahy, Allison Gartung, Haixia Yang, Molly M. Gilligan, Megan L. Sulciner, Jaimie Chang, Julia Piwowarski, Anna Fishbein, and DulceSoler-Ferran, all with the Cancer Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Harvard Medical School (HMS);
• Charles N. Serhan from the Center for Experimental Therapeutics and Reperfusion Injury and Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, HMS;
• Vikas P. Sukhatme from the Department of Medicine and Center for Affordable Medical Innovation at Emory University School of Medicine;
• Jun Yang and Bruce D. Hammock from the Department of Entomology and Nematology and UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center at University of California, Davis;
• Swati S. Bhasin and Manoj Bhasin from the Division of Interdisciplinary Medicine and Biotechnology, Department of Medicine,
at BIDMC, HMS;
• Diane R. Bielenberg, Birgitta A. Schmidt and Steven J. Staffa from the Vascular Biology Program, Department of Pathology, and Department of Anesthesiology, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital (BCH), HMS;
• Matthew A. Sparks from the Division of Nephrology, Department of Medicine at Duke University and Durham VA Medical Centers;
• Vidula Sukhatme from GlobalCures Inc.;
• Mark W. Kieran from Division of Pediatric Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Center Institute and Department of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at BCH, HMS; and Sui Huang from the Institute of Systems Biology. 


The researchers said the project drew generous support from the National Cancer Institute (Panigrahy and Serhan), Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the Credit Unions Kids at Heart Team (Panigrahy), C.J. Buckley Pediatric Brain Tumor Fund (Kieran), the Kamen Foundation (Kieran), the Joe Andruzzi Foundation (Kieran), National Institute of Environmental Health Science Superfund Research Program (Hammock); National Institute of Environmental Health Science (Hammock), Sheth family (Sukhatme), Stop and Shop Pediatric Brain Tumor Fund (Kieran), Molly's Magic Wand for Pediatric Brain Tumors (Kieran), the Markoff Foundation Art-In-Giving Foundation (Kieran), and Jared Branfman Sunflowers for Life (Kieran). 

For 20 years, the Hammock lab has been researching an inhibitor to an enzyme, epoxide hydrolase, which regulates epoxy fatty acids, but the inhibitor drug was not involved in this particular research. However, many other publications and ongoing cancer research projects are. "My research led to the discovery that many regulatory molecules are controlled as much by degradation and biosynthesis," Hammock said. "The epoxy fatty acids control blood pressure, fibrosis, immunity, tissue growth, depression, pain and inflammation to name a few processes.”

Hammock and colleague Sarjeet Gill, now a distinguished professor at UC Riverside, discovered the target enzyme in mammals while they were postgraduate students at UC Berkeley.