- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
And “millipede patrol.” And “powderpost beetle patrol.”
Kimsey, whose fly research on the island led to his nickname, “The Fly Man of Alcatraz,” will be leading 16 club members Saturday on an overnight insect/arthropod collecting tour, deploying insect light traps. They also will be surveying the rat population that threatens the bird sanctuaries on the island.
The project encompasses all of Saturday and part of Sunday. “Some in our group want to get back early so as not to miss the game,” said Kimsey, a faculty member of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and the club’s advisor.
Kimsey knows that the Seattle team’s bird moniker is “Seahawks,” but he’s more interested in other birds--the birds in the island’s rookeries and the “The Bird Man of Alcatraz” (Robert Stroud)-- than in who’s throwing the pigskin.
“I’m not a football fan,” Kimsey acknowledged.
A UC Davis “rat patrol” in February of 2012 led to the discovery of a fluorescent millipede, a common arthropod but previously unknown to exist on the island. After National Park Service employees fed rats a bait laced with fluorescent, non-toxic dye, Kimsey and the club members began searching for fluorescent rat feces.
Had it consumed some of the rat bait? No. An experiment at the Bohart Museum of Entomology on the UC Davis campus showed that these millipedes (Xystocheir dissecta (Wood) glow under ultraviolet or black lights, just like scorpions.
Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and UC Davis professor of entomology, suspects that the millipedes on Alcatraz Island originated from soil transported over from the nearby Angel Island when “The Rock” was just that—rock with little or no soil.
The species is relatively abundant in the Bay Area. “This particular species of millipedes glowed all along, but nobody was paying any attention to it,” she said.
Nguyen is now doing research in the Bruce Hammock lab on the florescent millipedes. He wants to know what compound makes the millipede fluoresce under a UV light.
This will be Nguyen’s fourth overnight trip to The Rock. “I’m very excited to return,” he said.
The former maximum-security federal penitentiary once housed some of the country's most notorious inmates including not only “The Bird Man of Alcatraz” but Al “Scarface” Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, and Arthur “Doc” Barker.
Robert Kimsey does research on the nuisance flies that plague staff and tourists on Alcatraz. He became involved in the fly project in July 2007 when he received a call about the annoying flies from entomologist Bruce Badzik, integrated pest management coordinator with the National Park Service, Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Since then, they have worked on a number of projects involving UC Davis Entomology Club members.
So while the 49’ers and Seahawks collect first downs, touchdowns and field goals, entomologists Robert Kimsey and Bruce Badzik and the UC Davis students will be collecting millipedes, beetles and other arthropods.
And doing “rat patrol.”
April 26, 2011 See more photos
He's not there to tour the “The Rock” or contemplate the lives of the notorious criminals once housed in the former federal penitentiary--inmates like Al “Scarface” Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, Robert “The Birdman of Alcatraz” Stroud or Arthur “Doc” Barker.
He's there to do research on the nuisance flies that plaque staff and tourists.
Meet Robert Kimsey, “The Fly Man of Alcatraz,” a name given him by a former guard at the penitentiary during the 2007 Alcatraz Reunion..
The professor-researcher has traveled to the island about 50 times since July 2007. When he stays overnight, he sleeps in the same cell once occupied by “The Birdman of Alcatraz”-- Cell 42 in D block.
Cell 42, basically an all-steel box with steel bars on the windows, offers a dazzling view of San Francisco.
“One day when I was working on research until 4:30 a.m., I laid down in the cell, extremely tired,” Kimsey said. “I looked through the steel bars and saw the lights of San Francisco. I thought about how I'd feel if I had to spend a large chunk of my life in this cell. I'd certainly be very angry with myself.”
Kimsey became involved in the fly project in July 2007 when he received a call about the annoying flies from entomologist Bruce Badzik, integrated pest management coordinator with the National Park Service, Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
Complaints rose to a feverish pitch in late August, September and October. The flies seemed to land on people as if they were rotten meat. Kimsey witnessed the incessant “shoo-fly” behavior on the docks and encountered it on a personal basis.
Kimsey identified the troubling fly as a “kelp fly” (Fucillia thinobia) or “cormorant fly” in the family Anthomyiidae. “But it's not a kelp fly as such,” said Kimsey, who plans to publish his research in an entomological journal. “It has nothing to do with kelp. It lives in purge-soaked soil under dead cormorants found in rookeries all around the island. It does not exist in any other place.”
Since federal law prohibits people from entering the rookeries--inhabited by cormorants, gulls, night herons, egrets and pigeon guillemots--Kimsey could not examine the rookeries until the nesting birds vacated the area.
Fucillia thinobia creates problems for four to six weeks as the cormorants start to leave the island, the entomologists said. In the late summer or early fall, usually in September and October, the flies vacate the rookeries on the west side of the island, and move to various parts, including the dock on the east side.
“With Bob's dedication and professionalism, he has been able to create this enthusiastic desire by island staff to know more about the biology of this fly,” Badzik said. “This is an impressive thing to do on an island with a rich cultural history.”
“This fly has no public health significance,” Kimsey said. “They rest on human beings as they rest on any other surface—on the ground, buildings and on humans. Like flying insects found on islands, they remain near the ground and tend to flit from place to place rather than fly high in an air column.
His research involved quizzing park rangers, former prisoners and guards at the 2007 Alcatraz Reunion, held Aug. 12. “Do you recall flies ever being a problem on Alcatraz during your association with the island?” he asked.
“Of 15 persons interviewed, all but one stated that they had no recollection of flies ever having been a problem anywhere on the island in the period prior to 1963,” he said. (The island was a federal penitentiary from 1934 to 1963). The sole person describing any kind of a fly as a problem recalled small non-metallic, gray-colored flies in the kitchen.
Back then the island had no extensive rookeries as it has today, Kimsey said.
Kimsey and Badzik, partners in the fly problem, know The Rock well. They have scrutinized every building, the entire shoreline, the cliffs and tunnels, the rookeries, trash cans, public restrooms, sewage facilities and “certainly every potential source of flies commonly associated with humans.”
The entomologists survey places off limits to the public, such as the Citadel, “part of the old Civil War fort beneath the main cell block where they used to put prisoners.”
The result: none of the sites contributes to the production of flies except the rookeries.
“We discovered that the shoreline of Alcatraz offers no habitat for the genus Fucillia,” Kimsey said. “F. thinobia does not breed in the piles of decomposing kelp and other flotsam, commonly known as beach wrack.”
So far, Kimsey and Badzik have identified 17 species of flies on the island. Before their research, no one knew how many or what species of flies existed on Alcatraz. However, only one—the cormorant fly—bothers staff and visitors.
Kimsey continues to place baited fly traps on the island and checks them repeatedly. He reared a colony of kelp flies in his UC Davis lab until a fungus killed them.
The UC Davis students also receive lessons on the history of the island from Bruce Badzik. For example, Alcatraz was the site of the first lighthouse and first U.S. built fort on the West Coast before it became a federal prison. Today the National Park Service offers year-around tours, except on major holidays.
“Alcatraz is truly a wonderful place to go,” Kimsey said. “It combines history with living history. The 1920s, 30s and 40s--and the criminals and gangsters of that era—those were interesting times in American history. There was this idea in the criminal justice system that one can correct criminal behavior by isolating them from other people--forcing them to be introspective by sitting in their cell and thinking about the wrongs they committed. The name, penitentiary, has its origins with Puritans or Quakers. They felt that when you commit a wrong and do penance, you can be reformed.”
Kimsey, who has attended several Alcatraz Reunions, reuniting former inmates, guards and others who lived on the island when it was a federal penitentiary, is now friends with many of them. Of the former inmates he's met: “To a person, each one had no desire to be involved in recidivism after staying on the island.”
For some, it involved a revelation. “They ‘saw the light' as they sat on the island contemplating the errors of their ways,” Kimsey said. “They fell back into the religion that they had embraced as a child. For others, it was an epiphany—a sudden realization--of why they should be good and the consequences of being bad. They didn't want to be bad any more.”
Meanwhile, the flies aren't the problem they were in 2007, 2008 and 2009 (the year Kimsey was awarded a National Park Service grant).
“In 2010, the cormorants didn't come back and neither did the flies,” Kimsey said. “Gulls came back but not flies. It doesn't appear they will be a major problem in 2011.”
It could be because of the reduced food supply for the cormorants, the forensic entomologist said. “The sardines and herring off shore may have diminished, perhaps because of a shift in currents.”
<“This has been one of the most interesting entomological projects that I have worked on in my career,” Badzik said. “Through our research, we are discovering an enormous amount of information on this fly and how it is influenced by the cormorants on the island. None of the other dozen or more species of birds on the island have any relationship—at least as we know right now—to this fly.”
(Editor's Note: Forensic entomologist Robert Kimsey will speak on “The Flies of Alcatraz” at a meeting of the Northern California Entomology Society on Thursday, May 5 in the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, UC Davis. His talk begins at 1: 15 p.m.)
Links:
Reservations to tour the island
About Alcatraz, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area
The Penitentiary
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894