Bug Squad

Paying tribute to National Pollinator Month...

When you visit the Joseph and Emma Lin Biological Orchard and Garden near the Louis K. Mann laboratory on the UC Davis campus, you'll see as the sign says "a slice of biodiversity."

Moving closer, you'll read: "This unique landscape showcases a slice of biodiversity in the heart of central campus and is a hub for outdoor learning."

A Slice of Biodiversity at the BOG | Bug Squad Image

What an intriguing project!

Several of us, including Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator of the Bohart Museum of Entomology, UC Davis, are rearing caterpillars of the Ceanothus silk moth, Hyalophora euryalus.

Lepidopterist and nature photographer Megan McCarty, webmaster of the Lepidopterists' Society, and who has reared Hyalophora for six years, recently hosted a Zoom session to detail the steps involved.

Hopefully, our 'cats will turn into adults, those gorgeous rustic-red and brown moths with crescent-shaped eyespots. This insect is one of North America's largest native moths; its wingspan can measure up to 5 inches. It's commonly spotted across the Pacific Coast from British Columbia down to Baja California.

In keeping with National Moth Week, the Bohart Museum will host an open house from 7 to 11 p.m., July 18. It's free and family friendly.

See more at https://ucanr.edu/blog/bug-squad/article/rearing-ceanothus-silk-moths

It's not yet National Pollinator Week (June 22-28) or the first day of summer (June 21), but it's a good time to visit the UC Davis Ecological Garden, part of the Agricultural Sustainability Institute, to see the native bees and other pollinators.

The purple coneflower, Echinacea purpurea, is a magnet for bees. It's an herbaceous perennial that belongs to the Asteraceae family. The genus name means "spiny one" and the species name, "reddish purple."
https://ucanr.edu/blog/bug-squad/article/native-bees-purple-coneflower

How are you celebrating National Pollinator Month?

Every June is National Pollinator Month, a time to raise awareness about bees, butterflies, birds and other species that sustain our ecosystems and agriculture.

Meanwhile, let’s play tribute to the California golden poppy, Eschscholzia californica, the state flower. Bees love it! The plant is a member of the family Papaveraceae. It thrives in its native habitat of California and extends to Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora and northwest Baja California (Mexico). It became the official state flower of California in 1903.
We observed assorted bee species foraging on the golden poppies, including several native bumble bees, Halictus bees, and (non-native) honey bees during a recent visit to the UC Davis Ecological Garden, which is part of the Agricultural Sustainability Institute.
There's gold in that garden! (Not all gold is at Fort Knox or is in our rocks, rivers and creeks.)

https://ucanr.edu/blog/bug-squad/article/how-are-you-celebrating-national-pollinator-month

Important climate warming research led by UC Davis entomologist Mia Lippey gained traction last week when a noted sustainable agriculture scientist wrote a commentary, “Beyond Temperature: Why Climate Adaptation in Agriculture Needs a Systems Approach” in the June 1st issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
In his commentary, Bruno Basso, the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Michigan State University, East Lansing, praised it “an exemplary piece of system ecology.”
“The significance of this work,” Basso pointed out, “is not in rejecting climate‐driven pest risk. “Risk remains and will grow. The paper’s significance is that it dismantles the convenient story of a single‐driver, species‐agnostic response and in doing so, exposes a more uncomfortable truth about how we forecast the biosphere under climate change.”

https://ucanr.edu/blog/bug-squad/article/spotlight-mia-lippey-climate-change-research

What a delight to hear UC Davis doctoral candidate and dragonfly researcher Christofer Brothers share his rhyming prose at a recent Bohart Museum of Entomology open house.
Brothers titled his 15-minute presentation, "Midair Basketweaving: A Doggerel of Dragonflies and Damselflies," a presentation representing preliminary work from his dissertation on dragonfly and damselfly hunting behavior.
Brothers described doggerel as "a term for funny, silly poetry without a universally set structure --though it can also sometimes refer to bad poetry, and some of my rhymes are certainly questionable!"
See more at https://ucanr.edu/blog/bug-squad/article/sharing-his-rhyming-prose-about-dragonflies

Forty-eight years ago, UC Davis scientists Becky Westerdahl, Eric Mussen and Norm Gary formed the Western Apicultural Society (WAS).
That was in 1978. A photo of them taken at what is now the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Facility, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, drew interest at a joint retirement luncheon held recently in the UC Davis Student Community Center for Professor/Extension Becky Westerdahl and fellow nematologist, UC Davis Distinguished Professor Steve Nadler.
Westerdahl, now Professor/Extension emerita, just completed a 40-year nematology career, and Nadler, 30 years. A total of 70 years...
"Where did you get that photo?" Westerdahl asked me.
https://ucanr.edu/blog/bug-squad/article/extension-nematologist-becky-westerdahl-40-years-service

Entomologists aren't just skilled at netting insects.

Some of them do well at croquet, striking a ball with a mallet and knocking it through a wicket.

Question is: Can the Ian Grettenberger lab at UC Davis swing a mallet as well--or better--than an insect net?

Agricultural entomologist Grettenberger, associate professor of Cooperative Extension and a member of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology (ENT) faculty, and his doctoral student Briley Mullin teamed to win the first-ever Graduate Student-Faculty Retreat Croquet Game.

The event took place Thursday, June 4 on the north lawn of UC Davis Student Community Center, following a morning of departmental business and lab talks inside the facility.

The Grettenberger team received a GOAT (Greatest of All Time) trophy, complete with a crown and a goat statue on a pedestal.

"Briley and Ian overcame the competition in the final moments for a dramatic finale," commented organizer Amanda Hodson, assistant professor of soil ecology and pest management, whose lab also competed in the croquet game. "They will safeguard the GOAT trophy until next year when they will have to defend it."

https://ucanr.edu/blog/bug-squad/article/through-wickets-win

Congratulations to UC Davis doctoral candidate Pallavi Shakya of the lab of nematologist Shahid Siddique, who won “Best Student/Early Career Talk” at the 36th Symposium of the European Society of Nematologists, held June 1-5 in Egmond aan Zee, The Netherlands.
Well done! UC Davis is proud of you!
The global competition drew 41 participants. Another student, Beth Molloy from the Crop Science Centre at the University of Cambridge, also scored a first, the only two awards presented.
Shakya's abstract: “Root-knot nematodes (Meloidogyne spp.) are among the most destructive agricultural pests that cause significant yield losses across a wide range of crops. Meloidogyne hapla is a valuable model for studying root-knot nematodes due to its parasitic diversity, small diploid genome, and a reproductive strategy that facilitates genetic analysis. Here, we report the most contiguous genome assembly to date for any plant-parasitic nematode built using PacBio HiFi, Oxford Nanopore, Illumina, and Hi-C sequencing. Genetic linkage analysis of F2 populations derived from crosses between M. hapla strains validated the assembly but also revealed anomalies indicating chromosome structure differences between parental isolates such as fissions, fusions, and rearrangements.”
"Strikingly, we identified sharply delimited zones with extraordinarily high recombination on most chromosomes,” she wrote. “Notably, several of these high recombination zones were significantly enriched for genes encoding secreted proteins, many of which contribute to parasitism. These findings suggest that meiotic recombination facilitates effector diversification and offer insight into how these parasites diversify their effector protein repertoire to change or expand their extraordinary host range. We further report the discovery of a novel 16-nucleotide tandem repeat and lack of canonical telomere repeats at chromosome ends. The localization of this 16-nt repeat at chromosome ends highlights a potentially divergent mechanism of chromosome-end maintenance in this nematode group. Overall, our study integrates high-resolution structural genomics, genetic mapping, and functional inference to uncover links between genome architecture, recombination landscapes, and host–parasite interactions.”
https://ucanr.edu/blog/bug-squad/article/congrats-pallavi-shakya-well-done

"If you want to find the native bees, look for native plants and vice versa. If you want to save the native bees, save the native plants."

So said native bee conservationist and native bee photographer Krystle Hickman, author of The ABCs of California's Native Bees when she addressed a recent Bohart Museum of Entomology open house.

"I photograph native bees, the plants that they have relationships with, as well as their locations. And primarily, I photograph in California," she said, adding that she considers herself a "conservation photographer as well as a community scientist."

"Um, community scientist, it's a term that I prefer to use over citizen science because they're basically the same thing. But the last few years politically, the word citizen has kind of changed from whether or not you have a degree in what you're studying to whether or not you're documented. So just to be more inclusive, I started using community scientist as a term...So basically what I do, again, is photograph bees in their environment, document their behavior, also notate their plants are on, and I keep track of things like times, dates, and weather. So I actually have an Excel sheet for every single location I visit, and I update it year after year, and it's a great way to keep track of things."

See more on Bug Squad blog at https://ucanr.edu/blog/bug-squad/article/krystle-hickman-and-abcs-californias-native-bees