Rangelands

Praying, preying, or peering? This female praying mantis, a Stagmomantis limbata, selects a patch of red Lantana to watch for pollinators. Her spiked forelegs resting, her eyes always watching but her body as still as a stone, she makes an incredible predator portrait.

Communities in Los Angeles and around California face a variety of water challenges ranging from access to clean, affordable water to water supplies threatened by a changing climate.

Do you know how to spread the wings of a butterfly specimen? It's not as easy as it looks, but entomologist Jeff Smith, curator of the Bohart Museum of Entomology's Lepidoptera collection, makes it look easy. If you attend the Bohart Museum open house, set from 1 to 4 p.m., Saturday, Sept.

The date of Sept. 28 is significant. It's the birthday anniversary of noted entomologist Richard "Doc" Bohart (1913-2007), founder of the Bohart Museum of Entomology, University of California, Davis.

It's great to see two high school seniors spend their summer doing research in a UC Davis nematology lab as young scholars in the UC Davis Young Scholars Program (YSP) YSP is a six-week summer residential program that introduces several dozen high-achieving high school students to original research...

Wings up! Let's go! The monarch fall migration is underway. "Unlike most other insects in temperate climates, monarch butterflies cannot survive a long cold winter. Instead, they spend the winter in roosting spots," explains Monarch Watch.

What we've been waiting for all season... A migratory monarch butterfly fluttered into our Vacaville garden at noon today (Tuesday, Sept. 17) and nectared on a Mexican sunflower, Tithonia rotundifola. Then she treated us to a butterfly ballet.

Writing my last blog post as the Livestock and Natural Resources Advisor for Placer, Nevada, Sutter, and Yuba Counties is bittersweet. When I became the advisor in 2017 (filling Roger Ingram's enormous shoes), I assumed I would stay in this job until I retired. Life had other plans for me.

You may have never seen this tiny bug that's causing big trouble. But agriculturists and scientists have. The spotted-wing drosophila (SWD), Drosophila suzukii, is an agricultural pest that is super tiny. It's approximately 2 to 4 millimeters in length with a wingspan of 5 to 6.5 millimeters.

It's Friday Fly Day, when folks post images of flies. Flies seem to the entomological equivalent of Rodney Dangerfield's "I-don't-get-no-respect" quote.