CONTENTS

Directors Note 1

Spotlight on a Species 1

Museum News 2

More Museum News 3

New Exhibits 5

Museum in the News 6

The Bug Doctor 7

In This Issue

Bohart Museum Society

Winter 2017 Newsletter No. 69

Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2017

Directors Note-

HAPPY 2017 everyone! Special

thanks to all of our donors for their support. We couldn’t do it without you.

We have a great group of interns and volunteers in the museum, and they have helped out hugely with visitors, curation and much, much more. Kudos to everyone!

The new year is shaping up to be a fun one in the museum. We just held Biodiversity Day and the turnout (and the weather) were fabulous. We’ll have a story on the event in the next newsletter. Don’t forget that Picnic Day is coming up in a couple of months.

-Lynn Kimsey

Unseen Life in the Sky

By Lynn Kimsey

Humans tend to believe that the only important lifeforms on earth are the ones we can see, generally large-bodied animals. Although this is usually vertebrates – birds, mammals, fish and such - it also includes large, charismatic insects - like butterflies and large beetles. What we don't see, and therefore consider, are the millions of small to tiny insects. When students first learn to collect insects they have to be taught to "see", and to change their search image for "animals". However, even experienced field entomologists rarely look up. It turns out there are some very interesting things going on in the sky above us, but because we can't see them they have long been “invisible”.

Over the decades a number of observations should have made us spend more time looking in the sky. Beginning with the invention of aircraft and human flight it became clear to pilots that there was a lot of small stuff up there. Scholars have long published observations of spiders ballooning and mentions of gossamer, the spider silk used in ballooning, have occurred in the literature for centuries. Yet until recently we lacked the technology to really see what was happening .

Starting in the 1920's technology made it possible to "look". In the late 1920's glass slides coated with Tanglefoot were attached to airplanes to sample what small creatures might be in the sky. In 1933 aviator Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic Ocean to Greenland with these slides attached to the sides of his airplane. He sampled insects between 3,000 and 12,000 ft. above the ground. In 1961 J. L. Gressitt placed a trap on a Super Constellation airplane that flew more than 100,000 miles sampling insects in the air column across the Pacific. His trap captured of all things, an individual termite at a height of 19,000 feet!

Bohart Museum Society member Henry Hespenheide also got involved in studying the aerial fauna in the 1970’s. He looked at airborne insects, and beetles in particular, as a food resource for birds. At the time two hypotheses had been proposed to explain how insects reached heights in the air column, passive buoyancy versus active flight. He found in beetles at least that body size decreased with altitude, which supported the passive buoyancy hypothesis, with the proviso that active flight could lead to passive buoyancy.

J. Linsley Gressitt

Gossamer in Davis. Photo courtesy of Jeffery Granett.

Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation. Photo by RuthAS, Wikimedia Commons.

Continued on page 4.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2017

MUSEUM NEWS

Wasbauer Challenge Grant

The Marius and Joanne Wasbauer matching grant was a great success. We raised more than $16,000! Thank you all for your generosity and support of the museum!

Financial Donors

Larry Allen Anonymous Larry Bezark

Henry Borenstein Janice Carvantes

Steve Clement Helen Court

Will & Carol Crites Chris Deidrick Mark Eberle

Marian Fraser Larry French

Ray Gill Al Grigarick Eric Grissell

Jeff Halstead Henry Hespenheide III

Larry Hummer Mike & Bonnie Irwin Lynn & Bob Kimsey

Ellen Lange Arnold Menke

Richard & Shawn Meyer Edward Mockford William Patterson

Jim Sanborn Sandy Shanks Nathan Schiff

Sheryl Soucy-Lubell Jim Tassano

Catherine Tauber Robbin Thorp

Laurel Walters Marius & Joanne Wasbauer

Bob & Connie Washino Rick Westcott David Wyatt

Thanks to Our Donors in 2016!

Insect, Book & Equipment Donors

Norden H. Cheatham Henry Hespenheide

M. Fran Keller Arnold Menke Richard Meyer

Edward Laidlaw Smith estate David Verity

Laurel Woodley David Wyatt Justin Zweck

We have a large crew working in the museum these days ranging from high school interns to volunteers. Our current high school interns are Noah Crockette, Parras McGrath (photo on page 4) and Ethan Gross. Under-graduate volunteer interns right now, include Crystal Homicz, Minsu Kang, Emma Cluff (below), Kaitlin Lopez and Michelle Tam. Then there are the regulars, undergraduates Karissa Merritt, Wade Spencer and Brennen Dyer, working on the NSF LepNet grant, and John So, Angel of Love Corniel and Jim Shen working on the tardigrade project. In addition, we also have Tom Nguyen, Fran Keller, Jeff Smith and graduate students Jessica Gillung, Charlotte Herbert and Ziad Khouri working here.

Butterfly eye. Photo courtesy of Kathy Keatley Garvey.

Folks in the Museum

The Bohart Museum of Entomology was pleased to host the annual “Gathering of Northern California Lepidopterists” on January 28, 2017. This annual event shares the location with the Essig Museum at U.C. Berkeley and saw about 25 attendees this year at the Bohart. The seven hour event gave butterfly and moth enthusiasts the opportunity to bring in their own specimens for identification, to donate specimens to the Bohart Museum, to share stories and information, and to enjoy several excellent presentations by members of the group.

The Bohart’s Lepidoptera research collection houses nearly half a million specimens from all over the world, and its well organized format allows for professionals and hobbyists to update their own collections and to do important research to advance our knowledge of this group. Attendees came from as far away as Las Vegas and Santa Cruz to join the many local members from the Davis and Sacramento areas.

Lepidopterists Meeting By Jeff Smith

Emma Cluff, showing kids one of our hissers at the Parasite Palooza open house. Photo courtesy of Kathy Keatley Garvey.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2017

Museum Outreach Interview

The College of Agriculture Dean’s office gave the Bohart Museum a terrific New Years gift. As part of the college-wide cleanup we were to get our floors deep cleaned. With so many visitors our floors had gotten pretty grubby. It took two nights to clean the whole thing. They even cleaned and waxed the floor beneath the compactor. So now, just in time for Biodiversity Day the museum sparkles.

Getting the museum ready for the cleaning meant closing down for four days while we moved everything we could to another part of the building and basically got everything off the floor. It took all of us two days to move everything and two days to move it back. This became the perfect opportunity to rearrange the furniture, purge the junk and basically reorganize. Maybe we should have the floors cleaned like this every couple of years.

Museum floor before cleaning (left) and after cleaning (right). Photo by Steve Heydon.

Lynn Kimsey and the young journalists. In front (from left) are Annel Martiez, Dalia Cortez

Garcia, Carlos Valle Vega, Darwin Montoya and Felipe Carbera. In back (from left) are

Jasmin Mayo, Natalia Gomez, Nathaly Cabrera, Daniella Delgado Martinez, Noel Ordaz,

and Juan Carlos Jimenez . Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey.

Floor Cleaning

MORE MUSEUM NEWS

Annel Martiez, Carlos Valle Vega, and Nathaly Cabrera playing with a Peruvian walking stick. Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey.

A group of young journalists came to the museum from the Migrant Education Program in Tulare County. Wearing their press badges and carrying notebooks they interviewed the museum director. They had all kinds of questions: how long I’d been at the university (a long, long time), what did I like about my job (bugs, bugs and more bugs…), have I eaten a bug (yes) and so much more. A great group of kids. We hope they come back next year.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2017

In the last few decades development of more specialized remote-sensing technology, including radar, has led to a greater recognition of the enormous number of insects in the air above us, and the sophisticated behaviors that guide their movement. Aviation radar has long imaged masses of large bodied migrating insects, such as monarchs. However, advances in remote-sensing technology, such as vertical-looking radar, have made it possible to monitor high altitude insect migration. A recently published study by Reynolds et al. in the Transactions of the Royal Society found an estimated 3 billion insects drifting overhead in Great Britain in a single summer month!

All of these small organisms drifting in the air make up the aerial plankton, the atmospheric equivalent of aquatic or oceanic plankton. As you'd expect there is a large diversity of microbes in this aerial plankton, including many kinds of viruses, bacteria and fungi. Plants also contribute their fair share; mosses, liverworts and lichens spend part of their life cycle in the air. Wind scattered seeds can also be found. Orchids for example produce millions of tiny seeds and many of these make it into the aerial plankton.

Then there are larger-bodied animals. Quite a diversity of arthropods - insects, spiders and mites - are carried into the air by intention or otherwise. There seem to be three basic ways that these organisms get airborne. The tiniest, like microbes, spores, seeds and mites apparently simply get caught up by wind and passively carried away. Others, like

Continued from page 1.

winged insects get caught by wind while flying and either stay airborne passively or fly up into the air to intentionally migrate, such as monarch butter-flies. The third mechanism is ballooning; the use of silk threads, gossamer, to get the animal

airborne.

Gossamer is very different from the silk spiders and caterpillars produce for land-based functions, such as webs and cocoons. Gossamer silk consists of bundles of very long, very fine threads. These "balloons" have a very high surface area and a positive electrostatic charge. A number of moth species have caterpillars that disperse by ballooning. One of the reasons gypsy moths are so devastating is that the newly hatched caterpillars disperse by ballooning. They climb to the top of tree, produce long silk strands and disperse to other trees. In spiders it is generally juveniles that balloon because of their small body size. Here too the spiderlings climb onto high points to balloon. They stand on raised legs, with the abdomen pointing upwards to release their silk.

Charles Darwin observed spiders launching themselves from the HMS Beagle during his 1831-1836 voyage. When the ship was off the coast of Argentina on a calm day it was inundated by juvenile spiders. He commented that “I repeatedly observed the same kind of small spider, either when placed or having crawled on some little eminence, elevate its abdomen, send forth a thread, and then sail away horizontally, but with a rapidity which was quite unaccountable.” Although Darwin thought that subtle thermal convections might have been responsible, it is far more likely that the spiders were using electrostatic fields to launch.

It turns out that many of these aerial

dispersers may be making use of the Earth’s vertical atmospheric electrostatic field to launch and stay airborne according to a paper published in Biological Physics in 2013 by Peter W. Gorham. Spider silk and insect cuticle both have static charges generated by movement of their body parts and by air flowing over their bodies. In addition, spider silk may be electrified when it emerges from the spinnerets.

The large numbers of insects dispersing as aerial plankton must have major environmental consequences by providing pulses of nutrients to different environments. During our insect survey of the Algodones Dunes we observed large numbers of agricultural pests and aquatic insects dispersing onto the dunes where they could not possibly survive, becoming live food for predators and high protein debris for scavengers, like the Algodones dune treader cricket or Microbembix sand wasps.

Many years ago in another study we sampled insects knocked down by aerial nighttime insecticide spraying done to kill mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus. What we discovered is that during the summer in the Central Valley clouds of water boatmen (Corixidae) fly at night from one water body to others (including swimming pools). Of course it’s not just insect predators and scavengers that make use of this aerial plankton. A wide variety of birds, bats and even fish feed on these insects as well as Henry’s studies demonstrated.

HMS Beagle in the Straits of Magellan. Frontis-piece from Darwin’s 1890. Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the various countries visited by H.M. S. Beagle etc.

Spiderling producing gossamer silk. Photo courtesy of Jeffry Minton, University of Colorado, Boulder.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2017

Folks in Vacaville discovered a large abandoned honey bee comb in a dead eucalyptus tree earlier this year. The hive was saved thanks to the efforts of Karen Shepard of Vacaville, who notified UC Davis of the find. Plus the help of Robert Arndt of the Nut Tree Airport, Jose Garcia, project leader of Atlas Tree and Landscape, and Dennis Starks of Atlas. They skillfully cut

NEW EXHIBITS Honey Bees Gone Wild

Kissing Bugs and the Ryckman Family

Wade Spencer and Parras McGrath showing off one of our new trophy beetle heads. Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey.

Never let it be said that the staff of the Bohart Museum isn’t competitive or creative. We saw all of the donated deer heads in the UC Davis Museum of Wildlife and Fish down the hall and decided that we had something just as good. So our students took several large scarab heads plus prothorax from specimens without data and created our own wall mounts with wood plaques made by Greg Kareofelas.

Prof. Raymond Ryckman holding part of his collection. Photo courtesy of the Ryckman family and Loma Linda University.

Jose Garcia (left) hands the honey bee colony to Robert Arndt. Photo courtesy of Kathy Keatley Garvey.

Jose Garcia (left) hands the honey bee colony to Robert Arndt. Photo courtesy of Kathy Keatley Garvey.

Thanks to support from the Ryckman family we are completing two projects. First, we are putting together a display focusing on the career and accomplishments of Prof. Raymond E. Ryckman. They provided us with photographs and even his lab coat from his time at Loma Linda University. The exhibit will focus on his enormous contributions to our knowledge of kissing bugs and the pathogens they transmit. The second project is a complete database of all of his kissing bug specimens and high resolution images of all of the species. This should be available on-line in the next year.

Bohart Trophy Heads

down the section of trunk containing the nest. The nest was saved for the Bohart. We are going to let the honey bees at the Bee Biology facility on campus clean out the remaining honey and once the honey is removed we will put the hive on display later this year.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2017

Museum in the News

One of the unforeseen consequences of our survey in the Algodones Dunes is the discovery of a new species of moth. Thus when the press started talking about a new species named after Donald Trump we were surprised to find out that it was from the Bohart Museum collection.

It turns out that lepidopterist Vazrick Nazari at the Canadian National Collection of Arthropods in Ottawa, described a new species of small moth from specimens we collected in the dunes—Neopalpa donaldtrumpi Nazari. This is a species of gelechiid moth. He named it after the president because it had a similar looking yellowish comb over…

We collected this moth in a Malaise trap in April 2009 in a wash on the east side of the dunes.

To date this is one of nearly 40 new species recognized from the Algodones dunes.

Face (left), dorsal view (above) of Neopalpa donaldtrumpi. Photos courtesy of Vazrick Nazari.

Donald Trump Moth

Bohart Museum Summer Camps By Tabatha Yang

Collection site for

Neopalpa

donaldtrumpi on the

east side of the

Algodones Dunes in

the spring. Photo by

Ziad Khouri.

For the high schoolers in your life who are entering grades 10- 12 next year, we have developed BBC 2.0. This is an overnight camp from July 23 to 29. They spend one night at Quail Ridge Reserve, near Winters. The next day is spent exploring UC Davis and the museums. Then Monday night through Saturday morning the camp is at the Sagehen Field Station developing mini research projects. This is the 5th year we’ve offered this camp.

The camps focus on insect science and wildlife biology, due to our partnership with the UC Davis Museum of Wildlife & Fish Biology.

Another great aspect of the camps are the teaching opportunities they provide

for our students . As camp instructors, UC Davis students gain invaluable teaching and mentor experience.

We do pre-enrollment from January through March, then campers are selected for formal enrollment in early April. We do this is to select the most genuinely interested campers. The process is already under way with the first application coming all the way from Germany!

The Bohart Museum Society generously sponsors need-based scholarships for several campers each year.

For more information about the camps or scholarships, please visit our website http://bohart.ucdavis.edu/summer-camp.html

I know it is cold and rainy , but this is precisely the right time to think about our entomology summer camps!

If you know of a budding entomologist entering the 7th, 8th or 9th grade in

the fall, tell them about Bio Boot Camp, Monday-Friday, June 19-23, 2017. This camp is a day camp based in Davis, but Thursday night there is an overnight at Sagehen Creek Field Station near Truckee, CA. We have been running this camp for 7 years.

BioBoot Campers examining honey bee comb.

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ASK THE BUG DOCTOR If you have an insect question, need advice, want an identification of something you’ve found, or would like to see an article in the newsletter on a particular topic let us know. Email us at bmuseum@ucdavis.edu.

Garden Shrimp

One of the more unusual invertebrates to show up in homes and gardens is a little shrimp-like jumping creature called an amphipod. Most people associate amphipods with beaches, where they’re often called beach fleas, but they can be associated with moist terrestrial and fresh water sites too. Given how wet this winter is becoming we might well see amphipods in the Central Valley this spring. Amphipods are a diverse group of crustaceans that bear a superficial resemblance to shrimp. They come indoors by accident and cannot live there unless you have a pond in your living room.

Forest Scorpions

Folks are sometimes surprised to hear that we have scorpions in northern California. They may have existed on the valley floor but agriculture and urbanization have pretty much eliminated their habitats. These little

Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2017

scorpions, called forest scorpions, are found under rocks, loose bark, under logs and similar places. They will sometimes blunder into homes in new housing developments, but because their habitat has been changed they eventually go locally extinct. These forest scorpions are harmless to humans. They can sting but rarely do. The venom has very little effect on us.

Insulation Moths

We were contacted by a homeowner who was concerned that the large number of small moths he was finding in his home were feeding on wool insulation they had installed as a green alternative to regular insulating products. This was the first we’d heard about using wool as an insulating material. Evidently it was at one time treated with diatomaceous earth to prevent insect pests, like clothes

moths, from infesting the wool. Today insulation wool is treated with boric acid, which is more effective overall. In any case, thanks to John DeBenedictis we learned that the moths were some-thing quite different, a gelechiid moth in the species Telphusa sedulitella and were actually feeding on nearby oak trees. Although it is not an indoor pest per se this moth can build up large population numbers, and become an annoyance as its attracted to lights and will come indoors in large numbers in the right situation.

California forest scorpion, Uroctonus mordax. Photo courtesy of Thad Seiler.

Indoor am-

phipod.

Photo cour-

tesy of Greg

L. Best.

Telphusa sedulitella oak moth. Photo by Jeff Ellingson.

Errata

Turns out we got the wrong genus on the robberfly below. It iss a species of Malliphora, not Laphria as we stated in the last newsletter.

Attacking Lady Beetles

Just when you thought you were safe. In 2008 Lindsey Derek published an article in Toxicon about a dog with Asian lady beetles embedded in the roof of its mouth. This was investigated by Snopes who found that the photo and another more recent one from 2015 were legitimate. Both dogs were found with the beetles on the roofs of their mouths and had severe chemical burns caused by the beetles. Harmonia will release hemolymph from the legs when disturbed. The fluid contains toxic compounds such as harmonine.

It just goes to show that dogs will eat almost anything.

Photo from Snopes: http://www.snopes.com/

ladybugs-beetles-dog-mouth/

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Bohart Museum Society c/o Department of Entomology & Nematology University of California One Shields Ave. Davis, CA 95616

Don’t forget to come visit us and the UC Davis campus on

PICNIC DAY

April 22, 2017!