CONTENTS

Directors Note 1

Spotlight on a Species 1

Museum News 2

Biodiversity Day 3

More Museum News 5

Summer Camps and More 6

The Bug Doctor 7

In This Issue

Bohart Museum Society

Winter 2016 Newsletter No. 65

SPOTLIGHT ON A SPECIES

Creatures from Mars or Maybe Alpha Centauri By Lynn S. Kimsey

Tardigrades, also known as water bears or moss piglets, have to be one of the most peculiar and indestructible groups of animals known. They belonging in their own phylum, the Tardigrada, and today are thought to be most closely related to arthropods and velvet worms (Onychophora). Although for many years tardigrades were thought to be related to nematode worms because of the structure of their mouth.

Tardigrades are tiny, tubby little animals, with a barrel-shaped body and eight pudgy legs. Adults range from 0.3 to 0.5 mm in length, but the largest is a magnificent 1.2 mm long. The body has five segments, including the head. The last four body segments each has a pair of legs. Their legs are short and wide, lack joints, and end in four to eight claws.

Tardigrades are found nearly everywhere as they seem to be fairly easily dispersed. About 1,150 species have been described. The Bohart Museum has one of the largest collections of tardigrades in the world, with about 25,000 slide mounted specimens.

Tardigrades are easiest to find on lichens and mosses, but they can also be found on beaches, in the subtidal zone, freshwater sediments, soil, hot springs and even on barnacles. If they get dislodged by the wind they can become part of the aerial plankton (tiny organisms including insects that are found drifting often thousands of feet above the ground). They have also been found high in the Himalayas to down in the deep sea.

Tardigrades feed by using the stylets in their tubular mouth (snout) to pierce individual plant or bacterial cells or small invertebrates. The majority of species feed on plants or bacteria, but some are predators on smaller tardigrades.

Even though tardigrades are related to arthropods (insects and spiders) and other animals that wear their skeletons on the outside they have a number of very unusual characteristics.

Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2016

Continued on page 4.

Scanning electron photograph of a tardigrade. Image by R.O. Schuster.

Directors Note-

Happy New Year! Thanks to all of you for making our Kimsey Challenge grant such a terrific success and for your donations throughout the year.

We have a number of special programs planned this year. Biodiversity Day is going to be even bigger and better than ever, with new collections, new exhibits and food. Come rain or shine it should be a day of fun. Bring your family!

Picnic Day is also coming in a couple of months. We plan to redo our exhibits and expand the Styrofoam man display.

As always, if you have any suggestions, comments or want to participate in events let us know.

-Lynn Kimsey

Hypsibius jujardini. Photo by

Willow Gabriel & Bob

Goldstein, http://

tardigrades.bio.unc. edu/

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2016

MUSEUM NEWS

Kimsey Challenge Grant

The Kimsey matching grant program was a great success. We successfully raised over $20,000 for the museum endowment. Thank you all for your support and generosity!

Financial Donors

Larry Allen Annonymous

Stanley Benedict Larry Bezark

Larry Bronson Richard Brown

Gill Challet Steve Clement

Will Crites Stephanie and Krishna Dole

John Edman Ray Gill

Linda Haque Henry Hespenheide

Larry Hummer Mike & Bonnie Irwin

Linda Katehi-Tseregounis Maryn Mason

Douglass Miller Bill Patterson David Rosen

Sandy Shanks Catherine Tauber

Robbin and Joyce Thorp Laurel Walters

Phil Ward Marius and Joanne Wasbauer

Thomas Zavortink

Specimen & Book Donors

A number of individuals donated specimens, books, and data this year. Many thanks to all!

Larry Bronson Richard Miller

James Mori Ray Ryckman Cindy Werner

Thanks to All of Our Donors in 2015! Sulawasi Indonesia. Who knows what next year might bring. The Philippines, Peru, Cameroon, and Colorado are all possibilities.

New Exhibits

In the last newsletter the Bug Doctor wrote about the mealworms that ate Styrofoam. This inspired one of our students, Wade Spencer to experiment with feeding mealworms from the local pet store on Styrofoam. Of course this had to become a teaching exhibit in the museum, so in addition to blocks of Styrofoam he purchased a Styrofoam manikin head normally used to model hats and wigs. This became our Mr. Styrofoam man display, which greatly entertains visitors and caught the attention of the local news media. In response to an article in the Sacramento Bee newspaper, the owner of a company in the San Joaquin Valley that manufactures Styrofoam generously donated funds for our/Wade’s research into whether and how the meal worms actually survive eating only Styrofoam.

The original studies out of Stanford used Tenebrio molitor, the common mealworm. We are using a different genus and species of mealworm, Zophobus morio, which is commonly sold in pet shops as giant mealworms. Turns out they too can feed on Styrofoam! Many of the mealworms are pupating, so we’re now waiting for the adults to emerge and start the next generation of Styrofoam eaters.

Museum Specimen Origins

By Steve Heydon

We are always adding new specimens to the Bohart Museum collection, roughly 30,000 per year. Generous donations of specimens by many collectors have been reported in past issues of this newsletter, but our staff and students also contribute large numbers.

The museum staff have conducted many expeditions and survey projects through the years, and it is my estimation that each day in the field by an expedition results in enough specimens to take at least a month to curate. Thus, it can take many years before all the specimens of a particular research project are finally incorpor-ated into the collection. Last year we added specimens from my 2006 trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the 1999 expedition to Papua New Guinea, Bob Schuster’s 1979 Venezuela trip, as well as the Sulawesi project, which ended in 2014, and our survey of the Algodones Sand Dunes (2007-2012). New projects are always coming along, so last year we began a survey of the Monvero Dunes, and this year a survey of a nature reserve in Belize.

Other groups also donate specimens. Staff of the UCD Museum of Wildlife & Fish Biology always seem willing to take Malaise traps along with them on their bird survey projects. Last year they collected in Texas, Arizona, and North Dakota. Additionally, most groups that collect insects are looking for particular kinds of insects, even though the traps or techniques they use collect many different kinds. The unwanted insects, (residues), can be shared between collections, and we get many specimens that way. So you can see that the Bohart Museum is adding insects from all over the world to its collection. Places as near as Fresno County and as far way as Tinukari,

Wade Spencer and Mr. Styrofoam man head that is part of our exhibit on Styrofoam eating beetle larvae.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2016

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2016

All adult tardigrades of the same species have the same number of cells, with the most having 40,000 total cells but some may have far fewer. Oddly, they grow by enlarging the individual cells, not by cell division, adding more cells, like other animals. However, like arthropods they do shed their exoskeleton, but unlike arthropods the mouth stylets are lost each time they moult and have to be re-secreted by a pair of glands that lie on either side of the mouth. Tardigrades may molt up to 12 times during their lifetime growing new mouth stylets every time.

Another aspect of moulting in this group involves mating. Most species reproduce sexually but a few are parthenogenic (females lay eggs that hatch without fertilization by males). However, unlike insects, mating in tardigrades takes place when the female moults. She lays her eggs inside her shed skin and the male then coats them with sperm. The fertilized eggs hatch after two weeks and the hatchlings are born with their full complement of adult cells.

As if this wasn't weird enough, tardigrades are cryptobiotic. This means that they can almost completely dry out and suspend their metabolism for hours, days or even decades. They are capable of curling up in a ball and completely drying out when no water is available, and then rehydrating when water returns. This protective, nearly lifeless stage is called a "tun". In California tardigrades live in moss spend more than half the year in this tun stage.

Another aspect of this cryptobiotic ability is that they can tolerate extreme conditions that would kill other life forms. Among these feats of indestructibility, tardigrades can survive being heated for a few minutes to 304°F or chilled for days -328°F or even 1 degree above absolute zero for a few minutes. They can survive high pressures of more than 1,200 atmospheres found in the bottom of the abyss. They can tolerate 1,000 times more ionizing radiation than other animals. Finally, tardigrades were exposed to the vacuum of space and solar radiation during the

Continued from page 1.

European Space Agency FOTON-M3 mission. During this mission groups of dried tardigrades were exposed to the vacuum of space and solar radiation for at least 10 days. After rehydration a few of those exposed survived. In a similar study Italian scientists aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour concluded that microgravity and cosmic radiation did not significantly affect tardigrade survival. That makes tardigrades much tougher than astronauts

As if all of these capabilities weren’t sufficient. Here’s more tardigrade weirdness! A recent study published in the Publications of the National Academy of Sciences by Thomas Booby and others (2015) suggested that one of the reasons tardigrades can survive these extreme conditions is due to horizontal gene transfer. They found that roughly one-sixth of the tardigrade genes were acquired from other organisms, such as bacteria. The authors proposed that tardigrades acquire foreign genes that help them survive extreme environments.

One final weirdness. A recent survey of Antarctica discovered tardigrades in the interior of the continent. This raises the possibility that these animals have been a condition of stasis (cryptobiotic) for thousands of years!

This all leads back to the title of this article. Carl Johannsen and I are collaborators in the NSF grant to

Oreella chugachi. Photo by Carl Johannsen.

Rick Westcott

(right) visiting

with Mike Irwin

and Rich

Montanucci in

Bisbee, Arizona.

database and conserve the Bohart tardigrade collection. This collection is the result of years of collecting, mounting, imaging and identifying by former collection manager, Bob Schuster and emeritus professor Al Grigarick and their collaborators. Carl and I have differing opinions on the origins of tardigrades. I think they originated on Mars. Carl thinks Alpha Centauri is more likely. I’m not sure he’s not right.

More

Traveling

T-Shirts!

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2016

MORE MUSEUM NEWS Museum Gift Shop

We have some new additions to the museum gift shop, including museum stickers and patches and Giant Microbe plush tardigrades (below) in honor of our NSF tardigrade project. Stop by if you get a chance! We also have Giant Microbe mosquitoes, crab lice, bedbugs and fleas,

perfect for the discriminating insect enthusiast.

Coleopterists Society Award

In a previous newsletter we described how one of our high school interns, Noah Crockette had the terrific opportunity to go to Belize in 2015 as part of the crowd-funded Cataloging the Insect and Bat Diversity in Belize Project organized by Dave Wyatt and Fran Keller. As a result of this trip he’s been working on a high school project to pin, label, sort, and photograph insects collected at the Toucan Ridge Ecology and Education Society (TREES) field station in the Maya Mountains in Belize. For his senior project Noah focused on comparing the diversity of scarab and carabid beetles in disturbed and undisturbed forest in Belize. This meant that he had to identify or find someone else to identify these beetle.

As a result of his work, he was recently chosen to receive a Youth Incentive Award by the Coleopterists Society. Ordinarily these awards consist of a grant for $150 plus $400 for equipment from BioQuip. However, Noah received $400 for the grant in addition to the equipment fund!

Noah plans to return to Belize this summer to look at the dung beetle diversity at the field station using traps with different kinds of dung to see if the beetles have any preferences. I’ll leave the source of his raw materials to your imagination.

Congratulations Noah!

Comings and Goings

Museum students and volunteers change periodically. We had several folks arrive or leave this fall.

Charlotte Herbert joined us in September as a first year graduate student. She’s interested in robber fly biology and systematics and has already done some very interesting work on robber fly venom. Yes, believe it or not some of them are venomous at least to the insects they capture).

Undergraduate Christine Melvin left us. She graduated with her B.S. in December and returned home to Isla Vista near Santa Barbara.

Angel-of-Love Chorneil became the newest member of our NSF Tardigrade crew this fall.

Alison Stewart graduated with her B.S. and is now working for Christian Hansen a new faculty member in the department.

We have a number of interns working in the museum. Undergraduate interns new this year include Arden Ambers-Winters, Brennan Dyer, and Ushrayinee Sarker. We also added another high school student intern in addition to Noah Crockette, Nathan Dao who attends Da Vinci Charter Academy here in Davis.

Noah Crockette imaging a bee collected in Belize. Photo by Fran Keller.

Charlotte with her new museum friend.

Plush tardigrade (above), Angel-of-Love Corneil showing off our new museum stickers (right).

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2016

2016 Youth Programs at the Bohart By Tabatha Yang

Once again we are offering our popular summer camp for junior high and high school-aged kids interested in the natural sciences.

The Bohart Museum, in collaboration with the Museum of Wildlife and Fish biology, is offering Bio Boot Camp (BBC) for the 6th year through the Campus Recreation Summer Camp programs. BBC is a weeklong camp for junior high kids from Monday, June 13 to Friday, June 17, 2016. The campers spend five full days and one overnight engaged in the natural sciences.

This is camp, so there is fun, games, and making friends, but the students also get hands-on science experiences not typically encountered until college. The days are spent on the UC Davis campus observing insects, learning how to prepare museum specimens and exploring the UC Natural Reserve area along Putah Creek. This year the overnight stay will be at the UC Davis Bodega Bay Marine Reserve. Every other year we alternate overnights between Bodega and the UC Reserve Sagehen Creek Field Station near Truckee, CA and Lake Tahoe.

Throughout the camp the students interact with many UC Davis staff, faculty and students who helped make this a memorable experience. Camp instructors are upper classmen or graduate students associated with

either the Bohart Museum or the Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, our sister collection across the hall.

High schoolers can engage in BBC 2.0. This is our third year offering this away camp. This year it will run from Sunday, July 10 to Saturday, July 16. The first night will be spent in the Coastal Range Mountains at the UC Quail Ridge Field Station near Lake Berryessa. Monday will be on the UC Davis campus exploring the collections and then Monday night through Saturday morning will spend up at the Sagehen Creek Field Station doing mini-natural history projects and exploring the Sierra. Spending all this time outside in nature is great for these budding scientists.

Anonymous comments from last year’s evaluations were all enthusiastic. One camper wrote: “One of the best parts of

camp was exploring habitats and places I had never been to.” Someone else wrote, “I loved the attitudes everyone had and I loved the hands-on work.”

Unfortunately both camps have limited enrollment and we always have a wait list. So don’t delay. Applications are due by the end of March, and students will know in April if they have a spot in the camp or on the wait list. We want to make the camps available to everyone, so we are able to offer multiple need-based scholarships to students through the generosity of the Bohart Museum Society.

More information about the camp can be found on our website at:

http://bohart.ucdavis.edu/html/summercamp.html

Jacob Montgomery, UC Davis graduate student in ecology, with the cabbage white butterfly he collected to win Professor Art Shapiro's Beer for a Butterfly contest. Photo by Kathy Garvey.

A UC Davis graduate student who wasn’t looking for it won the “Beer for a Butterfly” contest by collecting the first cabbage white butterfly of the year, Jan. 16 outside his home in Davis. Jacob Montgomery, a master’s student in ecology, walked out of his home when he spotted the cabbage white butterfly.

Art Shapiro, who has sponsored the contest since 1972 as part of his four-decade study of climate and butterfly seasonality, identified it as a female with a damaged forewing. Shapiro awards a pitcher of beer, or the equivalent, for the first cabbage white of the year found in Sacramento, Yolo and Solano counties. Montgomery collected his prize, Great White beer, on Tuesday night at The Graduate.

Shapiro earlier predicted that the first butterfly of 2016 would be collected in mid-January. This makes only the fourth time that he has been defeated, previously by his own graduate students. “I sort of consider this is a liberation because now I don’t have to look for it every time the sun comes out in January-

now I can relax,” Shapiro said.

The cabbage white is usually one of the first butterflies to emerge in late winter. Although the first flight of the cabbage white has been as late as Feb. 22, it is emerging earlier and earlier as the regional climate has warmed.

Cabbage White butterfly.

Photo by Greg Kareofelas.

Annual Butterfly Beer Contest

BioBoot Campers Simon Yang and Mark Hoang

collecting at Sagehen Cr. Photo by Tabatha Yang.

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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.

Kokopelli

One theory about the Southwestern tribal deity, Kokopelli, is that it is actually an anthropomorphic insect. Many of the earliest petroglyphs of Kokopelli make him look very insect-like. There are two different interpretations of the name. Kokopelli may be a combination of "Koko", a Hopi and Zuni deity, and "pelli", their word for robber fly, which has a prominent proboscis and a rounded back. However, a long-tongued mydas fly might be more accurate (see below).

Rhaphiomidas hasbroucki. Photo courtesy of Greg Ballmer.

Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2016

Odd Mud “Nests”

We recently had a request to identify what was making these odd “nests”. It turns out they are actually made by an introduced plant hopper in the family Issidae. Early on it was described as a native species, Hysteropterum severini Caldwell & DeLong, but later it was discovered to be an exotic species, Agalmatium bilobum (Fieber) from the Mediterranean.

This planthopper apparently feeds on introduced grasses. The mud-covered egg masses can be found on fruit trees and even grape vines, but it does not seem to cause any damage obvious to garden plants or commercial crops.

The question to ask about this insect is how does it manage to collect and carry the mud used to cover their egg masses?

Palm Flower Moth

An odd little noctuid moth is starting to show up more and more widely in California because we are planting their host plant, fan palms, more widely than ever. This is the palm flower moth, Litoprosopus coachella. The larvae of these moths feed on fan palm flowers. They don’t do much damage to the flowers, but they pupate in peculiar places. They’ve been known to create pupal chambers in folds of tarps, and indoors they’ll chew chambers into carpets and even books.

Who Am I?

Growing public and professional ignorance about insects is increasingly cause for concern. We’ve had a number of requests for identification of bedbugs from professionals including doctors that turned out to be anything but bedbugs. So here are some of the insects that have been sent to us identified as bedbugs. Can you guess what they are?

Early Pueblo petroglyph depicting Kokopelli (lower right).

Photo of egg cases in Yolo Co. by Brian Paddock. Scale bar is one half inch.

Agalmatium bilobum in Cyrpus. Photo by S. Rae.

1. 2.

3.

1. Crab louse 2. Bed bug 3. Carpet beetle

Palm flower moth cocoon and adult reared in Davis. Photo by Lynn Kimsey.

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

RAIN!!!