CONTENTS

Directors Note 1

Spotlight on a Species 1

Museum News 2

Biodiversity Day 3

The Winter of Straw 5

Insects and Drought 6

The Bug Doctor 7

In This Issue

Bohart Museum Society

Winter 2014 Newsletter No. 57

SPOTLIGHT ON A SPECIES

Monarchs, Going, Going, Gone? By Lynn S. Kimsey

Monarch butterflies are iconic. These big, colorful insects are known to every school child in the U.S. They are so well known that they are the state insect for Alabama, Idaho, Illinois, Minnesota, Texas, Vermont and West Virginia.

Yet monarch butterflies are in trouble. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of individuals arriving in their overwintering grounds in Mexico and California. Last year 60 million butterflies arrived in central Mexico, and that was considered to be alarmingly low numbers. This year the monarchs arrived late and fewer than 3 million had shown up by mid November. Final numbers for the year aren’t known yet but they will surely be low. What is going on?

There seem to be a number of reasons for the decline. One problem has been the weather. Texas has experienced severe drought conditions for several years. This meant that during the migration to Mexico there were few nectar sources available for migrating monarchs. Severe storms during the winter in Mexico can kill large numbers of monarchs as can spring storms when they are migrating northward. Another problem is deforestation of the fir forests in Mexico where they overwinter. The Mexican government has been ineffective in preventing illegal logging of these forests and considerable forest has been lost, leaving monarchs fewer places to roost.

However, the most significant problem for monarchs is the loss of food plants for the caterpillars. Monarch caterpillars only feed on milkweeds. In many parts of the country milkweed plants are considered weeds and are removed with herbicides along roadsides and in agricultural lands. Even homeowners remove milkweeds and then wonder why they don’t see any monarchs. There are more than 100 species of milkweed in North America, but only a very few are treated as garden or landscaping plants. This raises one of the issues with butterfly gardening. Everyone would like butterflies visiting flowers in their gardens but few seem to understand that to have butterflies you need to have caterpillars eating plants in your garden.

Monarch butterflies are among the largest members of the family Nymphalidae in North America. The common name “monarch” was first published by S. H. Scudder in 1874. It may have been given in honor of King William III of England. Monarch caterpillars store toxic chemicals called Continued on page 4.

Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2014

Male monarch butterfly. The arrow marks the androconium spot found only in males, which emits an odor for attracting females. Photo by Greg Kareofelas.

Directors Note-

Now that we’re beginning a new calendar year and spring is nearly here we’ll planning new events and other kinds of fun things we can do in the museum.

Thank you all for your terrific support of the museum. You rose to the occasion and made our matching grant a success. Particular thanks go to Marius and Joanne Wasbauer for their gift.

In this edition of the newsletter we have several stories focusing on the impact of the drought on insects.

-Lynn Kimsey

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2014

MUSEUM NEWS

The Wasbauer Challenge Grant was a great success! Your contributions totaled more than $15,000 for the Museum’s endowment! Many thanks to all of you who contributed so generously to match the challenge grant from Marius and Joanne Wasbauer at the end of 2013, including:

Anonymous

Larry Allen

Larry Bezark

Richard Brown

Mark & Brenda Eberle

John Edman

Glen Forester

Ray Gill

Al Grigarick

Henry Hespenheide

Larry Hummer

Charles & Marilyn Judson

Ellen Lange

Arnold Menke

Jim Sanborn

Sandy Shanks

Robin & Joyce Thorp

Laurel Walters

Marius & Joanne Wasbauer

Bob Washino

Rick Westcott

Wasbauer Matching Grant!

A Blast From the Past: Society History

While going through the museum library record files we came across the first Bohart Museum Society newsletter published in 1986 right after the society was founded. We thought you would be interested to peek back into the past for a look into how things have changed technologically, see friends long gone, and so many other changes in the past 38 years! Plus our old logo to the right. This is the entire newsletter.

New Faces

Join us in welcoming Toheed Iqbal to the museum. He comes to us from the Agricultural University of Peshawar in northern Pakistan. Toheed is visiting us

for 6 months to study parasitic wasps in the family Chalcididae, particularly the diversity of chalcidids in Pakistan.

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Biodiversity Day, Feb.8, was a huge success, even though it was one of the rainiest day of the entire winter! More than one thousand people came to campus to visit the museums.

Six museums were open to the public during this event, the Bohart Museum of Entomology, the Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, the Botanical Conservatory, the Center for Plant Diversity, the Anthropology Collections, and the Paleontology Collections. Most of these collections are normally closed to the public, so this was an opportunity to see some very special specimens, the curators’ picks.

You know about the Bohart Museum of Entomology but here are some details you may not know. We were founded in 1946 and at that time housed about 500 locally collected specimens in two Schmitt boxes. Today we have nearly 8 million specimens from around the world. You can find out more at our website, http://bohart.ucdavis.edu.

The Museum of Wildlife & Fish Biology is located in the same building as the Bohart. This museum houses more than

Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2014

50,000 bird, fish, mammal, amphibian and reptile specimens from around the world but with particular emphasis on California and North America. The museum’s specimens are used for training and well as research. Learn more at http://mwfb.ucdavis.edu/.

The Botanical Conservatory houses an incredible collection of live plants, cacti, orchids, carnivorous plants and even the giant titan arum (locally known as the stinky flower). This living collection

contains more than 3,000 plant species. You can find out more about the titan flower at http://greenhouse.ucdavis.edu/conservatory/.

The Center for Plant Diversity houses a huge collection of more than 300,000 pressed plant specimens in the Beecher Crampton Herbarium. The museum is home to the Davis Botanical Society and

Biodiversity Day

specializes in the flora of North America. See more at http://herbarium.ucdavis.edu/.

Then there are the human materials housed by the UC Davis Department of Anthropology Museum. The museum houses collections of archeological, ethnographic, biological and archival materials, including a fabulous collection of ancient Californian basketry.

The Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences (http://geology.ucdavis.edu/) houses significant Paleontology Collections of minerals, fossils, mining cores and ore.

The museums had events for children including a museum passport and rewards for visiting all six museums.

******

Next year, February 8, 2015 the event should be even better. Come, spend the day, see amazing things!

Collection manager Irene Engilis showing cranes

in the bird collection.

Collection manager Ernesto Sandoval discussing the plant collection.

Graduate students Natalia Lopez Carranza and

Mark DeBlois showing the paleontology collection.

Curatorial assistant Nathan Gonzales holding a giant pine cone herbarium specimen.

Undergraduate Sam Williams and the

anthropology skeletal collection.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2014

cardiac glycosides in their bodies from the milkweed they eat. Cardiac glycosides make vertebrates like us quite sick, so don’t eat a monarch butterfly or caterpillar if you can help it. The chemicals remain in the adult butterfly bodies as well but tend to be concentrated more in the wings than in the body. Interestingly, cardiac glycosides seem to have very little effect on insect predators and parasites.

Adults have brightly marked orange and black wings with white spots along the wing edges. Birds and most mammals including humans see these colors very clearly. However, insects, including other monarchs, see monarchs as black butterflies with white markings along the edge of the wings. Insects cannot see red to orange and it probably just looks black to them. So, monarch butterflies are telling potential predators to stay away.

Monarch caterpillars are strikingly colored as well, with bright white and yellow bands on a black background. These color combinations are typical in insects that advertise their toxicity.

Oddly, monarch populations found in south Asia and the Pacific Basin have a somewhat different coloration. The adults are paler in color, with the

normally orange parts of the wings being grayish white. Nearly 10% of the Hawaiian monarchs are this color.

Other than their coloration, monarchs are known for both their annual migrations as well as historical ones. Historically monarchs dispersed across the Pacific Ocean and are now found in Hawaii, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Australia, New Guinea, Sri Lanka and even India.

The annual North American migration begins as early as August. Populations west of the Rockies migrate to the Pacific Coast with overwintering roosts along the central California coast. One of the best known of these is in Pacific Grove. Populations east of the Rockies migrate to central Mexico.

Adult monarchs typically only live a couple of months, although they can live up to 5 or 6 months so the individuals that emerge in early summer do not migrate. Each generation takes between 5 and 6 weeks from egg to adult. The last generation of the summer goes into migratory mode. They stop reproducing and fly in a linear fashion to one of the overwintering sites. These individuals generally do not begin reproducing until the following spring in February or March when they

leave these sites and move north from the Mexican site or north and east from the Pacific Coast.

With this complicated life history it is easy to see how monarchs could run into trouble. It might take 2-3 generations to once more reach the northernmost parts of their range. Anything occurring along the way, a lack of nectar sources, storms and insecticides could cause a generation to fail. Failure of one of the generations moving northward could impact populations all along the migration path.

The take home message in all this is to plant LOTS of milkweed for the larvae and nectar plants for the adults in as many places as possible.

Continued from page 1.

Monarch caterpillar. Photo by Hectonichs; Wikimedia Commons.

Distribution of monarch butterflies, showing dates of introduction to regions in the Pacific Basin. Arrows indicate the directions of migration in North America. Image by Harald Süpfle, via Wikimedia Commons.

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“El Invierno de Paja” (The Winter of Straw) By Art Shapiro

Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2014

El Invierno de Paja. That’s what I’ve been calling this drought winter of 2013-14: the winter of straw. Why straw? Because the foothills, typically lush and green by midwinter, remained straw-colored, covered with standing debris from last year’s annual plants, with little or no “undergreening” until decent rains finally hit at the beginning of February. But those rains came after a record-breaking run of 52 consecutive days in midwinter without measurable precipitation, and with rainfall throughout the region well below 30% of average for date.

I’ve been monitoring the butterfly fauna at Gates Canyon, near Vacaville in the Inner Coast Range, since 1976 (see http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu). That first year – 1976 – proved to be anything but representative of the average seasonality there. 1976 was a major drought year regionally, and the butterflies at Gates Canyon came out preternaturally early that late winter: there were already 10 species flying on January 24 and this rose to 21 by February 11. More than half of all the earliest-first-record dates for species at Gates Canyon (38 years) were set that year. Other, later dry years (1991, 2012, 2013) were early too, but got off to later starts and only picked up speed after

mid-February. As the winter of 2013-14 shaped up as one of the driest ever, I anticipated many species challenging those 1976 early records.

The vegetation at Gates was if anything worse off in 2014 than in 1976. Many late-winter flowers, such as Shooting Star (Dodecatheon hendersonii) and Indian warrior (Pedicularis densiflora) did not show up at all. As of late February there was still no trace of Nemophila (N. heterophylla) or Winter Cress (Barbarea verna) or Blue Dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum) even in vegetative condition. The common annual lupine (Lupinus succulentus) had not germinated. California Pipevine (Aristolochia californica) was just coming out of dormancy. By February 17 a few Milkmaids (Dentaria californica) were finally in bloom—four plants in all! Butterfly resources—both nectar plants and oviposition/larval feeding substrates—were rare to non-existent. In 1976 the fauna was “forced” thermally (?) to emerge early and faced similar shortages. Would it happen again? Sort of.

My first visit in 1976 was on January 24 and yielded 10 species. On January 25, 2014 there were 8. By February 11, 1976 there were 21 species flying. But on February 17, 2014 there were still only 8. That was actually behind the pace of 2012, a moderate drought year. By February 22, 2014 the total had risen to 12. As of Feb.21, 1976, it had backed down to 18. (Keep in mind that in most years, the number of species recorded in January does not exceed 3, and in February, 8.)

The order of appearance of species is informative. The Mourning Cloak, Nymphalis antiopa, hibernates as an adult and is characteristically the first butterfly of late winter throughout its huge range in both the Old World and the New. The Echo Blue or Spring Azure, Celastrina (ladon) echo, is almost always the first non-hibernator. Beyond that

there is a set of characteristically early species, but their sequence of appearance varies from year to year. The Table shows a comparison of 1976 and 2014. Note that a few species were earlier in 2014 than in ’76 and even set all-time early records.

We know quite a bit about the environmental cues that induce seasonal dormancy (diapause) in butterflies; we know remarkably little about the cues that end it and allow development and reproduction to take place. It’s anything but obvious what accounts for the wildly-different species curves for Gates in 1976 and 2014. 1976 remains an extreme deviation from the norm, even though the weather was not more extreme-appearing than that of 2013-14. When all the relevant data are in (I am writing this on February 28), we will begin playing statistical games to try to establish potential causal relationships. Fruit growers know that the precise timing of rainfall can make or break the harvest. Can we identify critical variables that determine the precocity of the butterfly season in drought years? Can we determine whether the differences between the years are actually adaptive?

Art Shapiro in Gates Canyon January 2014. Photo courtesy of Kathy Garvey.

Graph of butterfly species diversity comparing se-

lected years between 1976 and 2014 in January and

February.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2014

Insects and Drought in California This will be the second and most severe year of drought in California. The impact of drought on plants and reservoirs is plain to see but what happens to insects?

When there is too little rain the impact on plants can be profound. Seeds of annual species don’t germ-inate, perennial plants don’t bloom, or flowering and fruiting is delayed.

The impact on insects depends on their life history. The impact on aquatic insects can seem obvious—no water no insects. But if the insect relies on human maintained bodies of water the impact may be minimal. Thus some pest mosquitoes may be little affected by drought, but vernal pool insects will be strongly affected.

Native insects have a diversity of life history traits that allow them to survive periods of stress such as drought. These traits include flexible diapause, migration and staggered emergence of generations.

Diapause is a period of suspended development in an insect egg, larva, pupa or adult that occurs during

unfavorable periods. It could be initiated by cold, heat or lack of water. Staggered population emergence is also called “bet hedging” by ecologists. Only some individuals resulting from the previous years eggs emerge the following year. The rest emerge in successive years to prevent the poten-tial loss of the entire generation if conditions are poor.

Cold temperatures during the winter cause larval insects to cease devel-opment or completion of development to adults until warmer temperatures in the spring. Desert insects cease devel-opment until rain falls, even if this takes years.

Drought may have an impact on pollinators, such as solitary bees as they may lack the floral resources they need when they emerge in the spring. However, native bees may time their emergence to rainfall not temperature or day length in warmer parts of the state. In colder parts of California its hard to predict what will happen to solitary bees.

In any case this year will be difficult for honey bees and bee keepers. California

normally lacks adequate nectar sources in the summer and fall for honey bees, and bee keepers have to supplement them with sugar water. In drought years this becomes a major problem and bee keepers will have to begin feeding their bees much earlier than usual.

Plant-eating insects often benefit from drought. Drought stressed plants are less able to defend themselves from herbivores, such as bark beetles and grasshoppers.

The western U.S. has been suffering from mild drought conditions for several years and this has led to major infestations of southern pine beetle, Dendroctonus frontalis. Because pines need adequate water to make their resin system work effectively, drought makes it hard for pines to defend themselves against the attack of this beetle. As a result we are seeing increasing numbers of dead and dying pines in many forests.

Drought though is a normal cycle in the western states and although this years seems extreme it may actually be typical over the centuries.

Central Valley of California, January 18, 2014 (left) January 18, 2013 (right). NASA Earth Observatory satellite images.

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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.

Strange Goings On

Odd Diets

Andy Engilis Jr., the Curator of the UC Davis Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology came over recently with insects found in the stomach of an eastern screech owl from Florida. These small owls are only 6-10 inches tall (about the size of your hand). It turns out that they spend a lot of time eating insects, grasshoppers, katydids and such, but what this owl had eaten was different yet. Two individuals of the American giant spiny stick were found

coiled up in its stomach. The largest of these was more than 4 in. long. This the first time any owl has been discovered eating walking sticks! Its hard to picture how an owl would even find one of

these insects since they so closely resemble plant parts much less gulp it down like so much wiggly spaghetti.

Frost Proof Roaches…

First found in New York City in 2012 scientists have now confirmed that the Japanese Cockroach, Periplaneta japonica, is now established in New York City. Unlike their American counterparts, the American cockroach, which is really from Africa, and others, such as the German and brown-banded roaches, this species can live out of doors at below freezing temperatures. Seems like the perfect winter to find

Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2014

out for sure...

Eastern screech owl. Photo by Greg Hume, from Wikimedia Commons.

Walking sticks (1, 2) and scarab beetle (3) from the stomach of an eastern screech owl stomach.

1.

2.

3.

2 in.

Space Aliens

Then there’s the latest news from Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. Michael Zavortink spotted these clothing optional figures in the bush outside Darwin. These figures are actually termite mounds; remarkably bulbous, humanoid mounds. Either the local termites are adopting clothing or the local folks are really bored.

Outback termite mound people and termite dalek.

Photos courtesy of Michael Zavortink.

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