- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
"We have some fabulous beetle people from taxonomists to ecologists to highlight our great beetle collection," said Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator of the Bohart Museum. "It should be a lot of fun and we look forward to people stopping by and appreciating such a diverse group."
Jonelle Mason, a UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR) employee and coordinator of Project Learning Tree (PLT) California, an initiative of the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (partnered with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection-Urban and Community Forestry Program), will be tabling children's activities in the hallway of the Academic Surge Building. They will include a hands-on peppermint beetle activity.
"We specifically have an activity focused for K-5 called peppermint beetle!" Mason related. "It models how animals use a sense of smell to respond to the environment around them and identifying smells in our daily lives. This is a super fun activity to present and then bring back to kids! It specifically will focus on bark beetles."
Mason, a master herpetologist and a former zookeeper with a bachelor's degree in biology, worked with exotic animals for 12 years before joining the PLT team to continue "my fierce love for nature and environmental education." As a zookeeper, she worked "with some of the largest animals on the planet" and "used animal training to influence thousands of people throughout the country."
PLT "uses trees and forests as windows on the world to increase students' understanding of the environment and actions they can take to conserve it," according to its website. "Since 1976, PLT has reached 145 million students and trained 765,000 educators to help students learn how to think, not what to think about complex environmental issues...PLT "helps develop students' awareness, knowledge, and appreciation of the environment, builds their skills and ability to make informed decisions, and encourages them to take personal responsibility for sustaining the environment and our quality of life that depends on it. From its beginnings in 1976, PLT has exemplified high-quality environmental education."
Cal Fire
Curtis Ewing, a senior environmental scientist with Cal Fire's Forest Entomology and Pathology, will show specimens of "many different invasive and native species that do or could impact forest health in California." They include such specimens as Ips engravers, Western pine beetles, flat-headed borers and various long-horned beetles. Among others on the list: coconut rhinoceros beetles, South American palm weevils, Asian longhorned beetles, emerald ash borers, gold spotted oak borers, Eucalyptus borers, invasive shot hole borers and Mediterranean oak borers.
"I will have a table with displays and a USB microscope hooked up to a screen and specimens," Ewing said, "so people can put different, small, species under the scope."
What should people know about bark beetles and the damage they cause?
"Forest pests (insects and diseases) annually destroy 10 times the volume of timber lost due to forest fires," according to the Cal Fire Forest Entomology and Pathology website. "Native bark beetles took hold in Southern California forests following severe drought years and caused unprecedented tree mortality. The introduced Pitch Canker Disease has attacked Monterey pine along the central coast. Sudden Oak Death, caused by Phytophthora ramorum, has been found in 14 counties in California and has killed thousands of oaks. Cal Fire's forest pest specialists help protect the state's forest resources from native and introduced pests, conduct surveys and provide technical assistance to private forest landowners, and promote forest health on all forest lands."
Burying Beetles
Tracie Hayes, a doctoral candidate and burying beetle researcher in the laboratory of Professor Louie Yang, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, will discuss her work and present a video she created, "A Clearance of Death on Behalf of Life" at https://youtu.be/cGLOE7SrbiU. She will field questions about the insect and her research. (See news story)
Folsom Lake College professor Fran Keller, a Bohart Museum scientist and a UC Davis doctoral alumna of entomology, will discuss the beetles she and other scientists collected in Belize.
"In November I started working in the Natural History Museum London Coleoptera collection, working on Belize Cerambycidae to facilitate identification and then catalog specimens for the Belize National Insect Collection," Keller said. "I worked with Larry Bezark, via the internet/email/Google Drive, who is retired from the California Department of Food and Agriculture. There were 28 new country records for Belize and two new species to science that Larry will describe."
"We don't have an exact number but I would say we have over 500 beetle species identified, but there are many more that need identification." (See more information)
UC Davis graduate student Jennifer Cribbs of the Graduate Program of Environmental Policy and Management, will display tree cores and boring tools. She focuses on restoration, botany and forest dynamics. Cribbs holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Stanford University. Following her graduation, she worked for the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey where her job duties ranged from tagging endangered sea turtles at Padre Island National Seashore to leading a field crew focused on assessing the health of white pines in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park.
Arts and Crafts
The family arts-and-craft activity will be to color a drawing of a carrion beetle, the work of Tracie Hayes.
The Bohart Museum, directed by UC Davis distinguished professor Lynn Kimsey and dedicated to "understanding, documenting and communicating terrestrial arthropod diversity," was founded in 1946 and named for UC Davis professor and noted entomologist Richard Bohart. In addition to its global collection of eight million insect specimens, it houses a live "petting zoo," featuring Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and tarantulas; and a year-around gift shop, stocked with insect-themed books, posters, jewelry, t-shirts, hoodies and more.