Rangelands

Stick insects, also known as walking sticks, stick bugs and bug sticks because they resemble sticks, may not get any respect, but they do at the Bohart Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Davis.

UC scientists, students and water agency professionals took a critical look inwards and a radical look outwards when they gathered in Sacramento in October to reimagine California water.

As some readers may know, I put out a quarterly newsletter (The New Foothill Rancher in Placer and Nevada Counties; The New Ranch Update in Sutter and Yuba Counties).

"How do animals filter sensory information from their environment and integrate it with their past experience and their internal states to produce an appropriate behavioral response?" asks Fred Wolf, assistant professor at UC Merced.

DAVIS--A huge microsculpture of a cuckoo or emerald wasp, the work of noted British photographer Levon Biss, now greets visitors to the Bohart Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Davis.

Quick! Can you think of published research that involves Skittles, magnolia leaves and mosquito eggs?

Note: This article first appeared in the October 2018 issue of The New Foothill Rancher and The New Ranch Update newsletters.

Congratulations to community ecologist Rachel Vannette, assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology: she was just selected as one of the 11 campus recipients of a Hellman Fellowship grant.

DAVIS--Using candy (Skittles), magnolia leaves, mosquito eggs and sheets of paper, UC Davis agricultural entomologist and remote sensing technology researcher Christian Nansen explored how light penetrates and scatters--and found that how you see an object can depend on what is next to it, under it...

[Originally published in the Fall 2018 issue of the Green Bulletin. Modified slightly from original.] Invasive wood-boring beetles are attacking hundreds of thousands of trees in southern California, including commercial avocados, and trees within urban landscapes and wildland environments.