- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
And UC Davis distinguished professor emeritus Harris Lewin, renowned for his research in comparative mammalian genomics and immunogenetics, did just that when he delivered the inaugural UC Davis New Emeriti Distinguished Lecture on “From Chickens to Cows to Everything: Perspectives from 40 Years in Science."
The lecture, held Dec. 7 in the UC Davis International Center and live-streamed on Zoom to attendees from five countries (United States, South Korea, Australia, Japan and Israel), chronicled his bovine leukemia research that led to his receiving the 2011 Wolf Prize in Agriculture, an award comparable to the Nobel Prize in Agriculture.
Lewin's seminar was the first in a series of three lectures honoring new emeriti and coordinated by UC Davis distinguished professor Walter Leal of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, former chair of the Department of Entomology and Nematology. Lewin's lecture is online at https://youtu.be/sWzEyQTM-qQ.
“The New Emeriti Distinguished Lecture series is a platform to celebrate the accomplishments of retiring colleagues,” Leal said. “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."
All lectures are free and open to the public.
In his welcoming address, UC Davis Chancellor Gary May commented: "I'd like to thank Dr. Lewin for giving the first lecture in this series. Harris is the former vice chancellor for research and a distinguished professor emeritus in evolution and ecology. He also holds the Robert and Rosabel Osborne Endowed Chair with work that specializes in the genome evolution of mammals. Like Dr. Lewin, all of our emeriti deserve recognition. They continue to make critical discoveries in their research and scholarship across disciplines. For our new emeriti, I welcome you to this distinguished group and encourage you to stay engaged with campus. Your emeriti play a vital role in keeping our campus on an upward trajectory lending time, talents and treasure to keep our university thriving. The Emeriti Association has resources and support for this newest chapter of our career. We're grateful for your dedication to UC Davis and congratulations on reaching this milestone."
"I had numerous interactions with Harris but the the enduring memory is meeting him right in front of Briggs for coffee," Hammock said, "and he was so excited over his latest paper (genetics) that he was trembling. So he's been fun for a long time."
Lewin thanked his mentors, colleagues, collaborators, family and friends. He recalled his 27 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he held the E.W. and J.M. Gutgsell Endowed Professorship in Immunogenetics and served as director of the University of Illinois Biotechnology Center, founding director of the W.M. Keck Center for Comparative and Functional Genomics, and founding director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.
Following his nearly three decades at the University of Illinois, Lewin returned to UC Davis to serve as the vice chancellor for research, 2011-2016. Then UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi videoed how she was able to recruit him. She praised him for "the stellar job that laid the foundation" for UC Davis to reach the recent billion dollar mark in research funding.
After scores of colleagues lauded Lewin's scientific research, his daughter, Sara Lebwohl, stated that his most important title is "My Da (dy)." Granddaughter Halle, corrected her: "No, it's Grandpa Harris."
Next Two Lectures
UC Davis distinguished professor emeritus Geerat Vermeij, an evolutionary biologist and paleoecologist with the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, will present the second in the three-part New Emeriti Distinguished Lecture series at 3 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 15 on" The Evolution of Power." It will be live-streamed on Zoom; registration is underway at https://bit.ly/3BXh0zA.
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."
"I've looked at the geological effect of power, in all kinds of different ways, and integrated it with our own human history which is also a history of increasing power and I've come to realize that over the great arch of geological time, so hundreds to millions to billions of years, there's been an overall increase in maximum power, that is, accomplished by the most powerful entities in the world. I discuss this at some length and will end by saying that humans have now been the first species of earth to create what I would describe as an economic and power monopoly with all the problems that it has brought."
Vermeij is known for his work on coevolutionary relationships 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 laude from 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 series of New Emeriti Distinguished Lectures concludes with the spring lecture by UC Davis distinguished professor emeritus Sharon Strauss of the Department of Evolution and Ecology. It will take place at 3 p.m., Wednesday, April 19 in the International Center and also will be live-streamed on Zoom. Strauss is known for her work on how species evolve as a consequence of community membership (their complex interactions with co-occurring species); direct and indirect effects (through pollinators) of herbivory on male and female plant fitness.
Great Citizen of the Campus. In his opening remarks, Lewin described Leal "as a great citizen of the campus" and "Walter is really the only person who can pull something off like this." Leal won the Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award for his four online or virtual symposiums on COVID-19 that drew more than 6000 viewers from 35 countries. Widely recognized for his research, teaching and mentorships, Leal is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, American Association for the Advancement of Science, California Academy of Sciences, Royal Entomological Society and the Entomological Society of America (ESA). The UC Davis Academic Senate named him the recipient of its 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award for Undergraduate Teaching, and the Pacific Branch of ESA presented him with its 2020 Award of Excellence in Teaching. Leal was recently selected the 2022 recipient of the College of Biological Sciences (CBS) Faculty Teaching Award.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Newly published UC Davis research analyzing modern-day and museum collections of monarch butterflies over a 200-year period indicates that the loss of migration and range expansion leads to smaller and shorter wings.
The research, “Two Centuries of Monarch Butterfly Collections Reveal Contrasting Effects of Range Expansion and Migration Loss on Wing Traits,” appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We measured the wings of 6,000 museum specimens of monarch butterflies collected from 1856 to the present, as well as contemporary wild-caught monarchs from around the world,” said lead author Micah Freedman, a former UC Davis doctoral candidate in population biology and now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago.
“The major implications of the research,” Freedman said, “are that it shows (1) loss of migration can affect the evolution of monarch butterflies over contemporary time scales--dozens to hundreds of years; and (2) monarchs with large forewings are better-suited for long distance movement, and this likely contributed to their global expansion over the past 200 years.”
Co-Authors of PNAS Paper
Freedman works closely with noted migratory animal authority and co-author Hugh Dingle, emeritus professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, who received a 2014 UC Davis Edward A. Dickson Professorship Award to research “Monarchs in the Pacific: Is Contemporary Evolution Occurring on Isolated Islands?” They co-authored the research with Sharon Strauss, professor and Santiago Ramirez, associate professor, Center for Population Biology and the Department of Evolution and Ecology.
Their research documents how migration-associated traits may be favored during range expansion but disfavored when species cease seasonal migration. “Furthermore, it highlights the value of museum collections by combining historical specimens with experimental rearing to demonstrate contemporary evolution of migration-associated traits in natural monarch populations,” Freedman said.
Said Dingle: “At a time when museum collections are under pressure from a scarcity of funding, the results also show just how valuable such collections can be to evolutionary research and to the understanding of ongoing biological processes in the face of anthropogenic change.”
In their abstract, they pointed out that “migratory animals exhibit traits that allow them to exploit seasonally variable habitats. In environments where migration is no longer beneficial, such as oceanic islands, migration-association traits may be selected against or be under relaxed selection.”
“Monarch butterflies are best known for their continent-scale migration in North America but have repeatedly become established as non-migrants in the tropical Americas and on Atlantic and Pacific Islands,” they wrote. “These replicated non-migratory populations provide natural laboratories for understanding the rate of evolution of migration-associated traits.”
What They Determined
They determined (1) how wing morphology varies across the monarch's global range, (2) whether initial long-distance founders were particularly suited for migration and (3) whether recently-established non-migrants show evidence for contemporary phenotypic evolution.
Under controlled conditions in a UC Davis lab, they also reared more than 1000 monarchs from six populations around the world and measured migration-associated traits.
“Historical specimens show that initial founders are (1) well-suited for long-distance movement and (2) loss of seasonal migration is associated with reductions in forewing size and elongation,” they related. “Monarch butterflies raised in a common garden from four derived non-migratory populations exhibit genetically based reductions in forewing size, consistent with a previous study.”
Dingle said the findings “provide a compelling example of how migration-associated traits may be favored during the early stages of range expansion, and also the rate of reductions in those same traits upon loss of migration.”
Statistics show that the population of monarch butterflies in the United States has declined by 90 percent over the past 20 years.
Undergoing Contemporary Evolution
The monarch butterflies established just 200 years ago in remote Pacific Islands are undergoing contemporary evolution through differences in their wing span and other changes, Dingle said. He and Freedman studied monarchs in the Pacific Islands for a week in 2016 in a project funded by Dingle's UC Davis emeritus faculty grant, the Edward A. Dickson Professorship Award. The research involved measuring the wingspans of Guam monarchs to determine whether there has been an evolutionary decrease in size or shape due to their migration-free lifestyle on the island. They also measured the wings of monarchs in the University of Guam's museum collection.
An analysis of a monarch population in Hawaii shows that resident monarchs have shorter, broader wings than the long-distance migrants, Dingle noted. The Hawaii butterfly wings were shorter than the eastern U.S. long-distance migrants, but “not so short-winged as the residents in the Caribbean or Costa Rica, which have been present in those locations for eons, rather than the 200 years for Hawaii.”
Dingle, author of two editions of Migration: The Biology of Life on the Move (Oxford University Press), a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a past president of the Animal Behavior Society, said previous studies by various authors revealed that migrant and long-resident monarchs exhibit different wing shapes. "Thus, it was desirable to examine populations with only short residency to see if the same phenomenon was evident.”
Dingle, who served as a UC Davis entomology professor from 1982 to 2002, achieving emeritus status in 2003, has engaged in research throughout the world, including the UK, Kenya, Thailand, Panama, Germany and Australia. National Geographic featured Dingle in its cover story on “Great Migrations” in November 2010. LiveScience interviewed him for its November 2010 piece on“Why Do Animals Migrate?”
The Bohart Museum of Entomology at UC Davis was among the 22 global museum collections studied. The research also included private collections and online databases. Freedman and assistant Christopher Jason reared some of the butterflies included in the PNAS paper in a UC Davis greenhouse.
The project drew funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute Program, the UC Davis Center for Population Biology, and the National Geographic Society to Freedman, as well as the Dickson Emeritus Professor Award to Dingle, a California Agricultural Experiment Station grant to Strauss, and a David and Lucille Packard Fellowship to Ramirez.
The abstract:
“Migratory animals exhibit traits that allow them to exploit seasonally variable habitats. In environments where migration is no longer beneficial, such as oceanic islands, migration-association traits may be selected against or be under relaxed selection. Monarch butterflies are best known for their continent-scale migration in North America but have repeatedly become established as non-migrants in the tropical Americas and on Atlantic and Pacific Islands. These replicated non-migratory populations provide natural laboratories for understanding the rate of evolution of migration-associated traits. We measured more than 6,000 museum specimens of monarch butterflies collected from 1856 to the present, as well as contemporary wild-caught monarchs from around the world. We determined (1) how wing morphology varies across the monarch's global range, (2) whether initial long-distance founders were particularly suited for migration and (3) whether recently-established non-migrants show evidence for contemporary phenotypic evolution. We further reared more than 1,000 monarchs from six populations around the world under controlled conditions and measured migration-associated traits. Historical specimens show that (1) initial founders are well-suited for long-distance movement and (2) loss of seasonal migration is associated with reductions in forewing size and elongation. Monarch butterflies raised in a common garden from four derived non-migratory populations exhibit genetically-based reductions in forewing size, consistent with a previous study. Our findings provide a compelling example of how migration-associated traits may be favored during the early stages of range expansion, and also the rate of reductions in those same traits upon loss of migration.”
As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, Freedman said he is "currently using breeding experiments and DNA sequencing trying to figure out which genes affect migratory traits and behaviors in monarchs. This includes wing traits (shapes and size) discussed in the PNAS paper.”