In This Issue

Bohart Museum Society

Winter 2019 Newsletter No. 78

Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Spring 2019

SPOTLIGHT ON A SPECIES

“M” is for “Monarch” By Art Shapiro

Monarchs are “charismatic.” They have a big public following—mass appeal—and their dwindling populations make them a “poster child” for conservation. The attention paid to monarchs has broadly over-shadowed a wider and more alarming reality: they’re hardly alone. Much of our butterfly fauna, at all elevations and including widespread and hitherto abundant species, appears to be in trouble. The year 2018 was my worst monarch year, not only in California, but in my life (at least since I was 8). In 260 days afield I saw a total of 36 monarchs, down from 75 in 2017 and 88 in 2016. Of these 36 seen in 2018, 11 were crossing the Sierra migrating westward from presumed breeding grounds in Nevada, meaning I saw only 25 adults in their California

breeding grounds, and not one caterpillar for the first time ever. But 2018 was also the worst year ever for the mass-migratory painted lady, Vanessa cardui. In 2017 I saw 315 on the northward migration in spring and 197 going south in the fall; those numbers are already low. But in 2018 the corresponding numbers were 25 and 2! Most species that I track were down, and 2018 was the first year in 47 that whole faunas were depressed at all elevations, from sea-level to tree-line. So this is not just a monarch problem!

There are claims that monarch declines are being driven by a shortage of milkweeds, their larval hosts. Supposedly this is all Monsanto’s fault: genetically-engineered “Roundup-Ready” crops allow farmers to apply herbicides everywhere, in the process killing off the milkweeds that monarchs need. The evidence for a milkweed shortage – in my opinion – is weak and mostly indirect, based on a correlation between herbicide use and monarch declines in the East and Midwest. There has never been any evidence of a milkweed shortage in the West, and in fact 2018 was the best milkweed year I have observed regionally. There just were no butterflies to lay eggs on it! And back East, unlike here, 2018 was an excellent year for monarch breeding, by all accounts. If milkweed has been a limiting factor, what were they eating—press releases?

The situation is further complicated by the

Monarch caterpillars. Photo courtesy of Kathy Garvey.

Continued on page 4.

CONTENTS

Directors Note 1

Spotlight on a Species 1

Museum News 2

Monarchs Down Under 3

More Museum News 5

Taxonomy Fail Index 6

Ask the Bug Doctor 7

Monarch butterfly. Photo courtesy of Kathy Garvey.

This edition of the Bohart Museum Society Newsletter is largely devoted to monarch butterflies. Art Shapiro kindly contributed the lead article to give his view of the current status of California monarch, and of butterfly populations in general. We’ve also included a story on historical monarch dispersal.

Many of the news stories about insects are full of strong opinions and overstated issues. There’s so much about insects we don’t know. So be careful about taking news stories at face value; correlation is not causation.

-Lynn Kimsey

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Spring 2019

MUSEUM NEWS

Biodiversity Museum Day, February 16, was a huge success. Thirteen campus biological collections and museums have participated in this event for a number of years. This was the best year yet. The Bohart Museum was open from 9am to 1pm. We had more than 20 volunteers, including faculty, staff and students showing off the petting zoo and answering visitor’s questions. More than 4,500 visitors came to the museum.

One family drove all the way from Washington state to bring their third grade daughter to see the collection. She raises mantises and networks with other mantis enthusiasts on-line. It turned out that the person who’d helped her the most was one of our undergraduate students Lohit Garikipati. Lohit was staffing the mantis table and she got to meet him. She was so excited.

Most folks came from the greater Sacramento Region. However, others came from as far away as San Diego, California.

Everyone had a great time. By the time we closed at 1 we were all exhausted but thrilled by how well it went.

A Salute to Our Greatest Contributor

Biodiversity Day visitors in the hallway outside of the Bohart Museum. Photo by Kathy Garvey. A letter of thanks from a third grader.

Jeff Smith above showing off one of his redwood drawers and a stack of his drawers in the collection (below).

Biodiversity Museum Day

Over the years the Bohart Museum has been fortunate to have many great contributors who’ve made it possible for the museum to do so much more to serve the research community and the general public. But without question the person who has contributed in the most ways and over years is Jeff Smith.

Jeff has volunteered in the museum for several decades. He can always be counted on to greet visitors and show them butterflies, and participate in community outreach as well. He’s spent thousands of hours organizing and recurating the butterfly and moth collection. He’s spread the wings on tens of thousands of butterfly and moth specimens in the collection or donated to the collection. He teaches students how to spread moth and butterfly wings and even makes the spreading boards for the students to use and take home!

As if this wasn’t enough he and his wife Cathy have made considerable financial donations as well. Perhaps even a greater contribution — Jeff has at his own cost made more than 2,000 glass topped drawers for the collection. These drawers are gorgeous. He’s even taken old redwood decking and turned it into drawers.

Thank you Jeff for everything!

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Spring 2019

Monarchs Down Under Monarch butterflies, Danaus plexippus, were first observed in Australia in the summer of 1871. However, there were simultaneous reports of monarchs in different parts of the country, which suggests that the monarch was probably already established on the continent as early as 1860. These butterflies appeared across the Pacific Ocean in the mid 1800's. What was going on?

For monarchs to become established in all these new habitats two things had to coincide, dispersal and the presence of acceptable food plants. This nineteenth century dispersal event occurred during the time of the California Gold Rush when there was considerable ship traffic across the Pacific between California and Australia. Storms and wind events may have assisted monarch’s dispersal across the Pacific from island to island, but they may also have hitchhiked by sailing ship.

Second, they needed host plants. Monarch butterflies only feed on milkweeds in the family Apocynaceae (once belonging to the now submerged family Asclepiadaceae). There are native milkweeds in Australia, such as the cotton bush, and other species on some of the other Pacific islands but monarch butterflies do not appear to feed on

these plants. Fortunately for monarch butterflies European settlers, particularly English colonists, introduced a diversity of exotic garden plants to their communities overseas. In Australia, Asclepius species (American milkweeds) from the New World and Gomphocarpus species (balloon plant or balloon cotton-bush) from Africa were planted in many communities on the eastern coast. There are records of both types of milkweeds growing in Australia starting around 1860. As happens so often with plants adapted to disturbed habitats, the introduced milkweeds thrived spreading rapidly up the eastern coast of Australia.

The milkweed Calotropis gigantea, also known as crown flower, was the first milkweed in the Hawaiian Islands. It was introduced from Southeast Asia in the mid 1800's. This made it possible for monarch butterflies to survive and thrive in Hawaii as early as 1840. The presence of this milkweed also shortened the distance to by half that needed to get to Australia and to other now colonized Pacific islands.

So it's all about timing. Had monarchs

dispersed before their host plants were present in Australia they could never have become established or thrived. It's quite likely that dispersal into the Pacific Basin was taking place frequently prior to this critical period, but because no acceptable host plants were available the butterflies could not establish populations. Dispersing monarchs simply died in the ocean or once they reached land.

Once humans provided host plants and transportation enough monarchs managed to survive crossing the Pacific Ocean to become established on a number of islands in the western Pacific. Overall, these butterflies have had little environmental impact in these regions because their host plants are all exotic.

Dispersal dates of monarch butterflies globally. Map by Harald Süpfle & Wiz9999 Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4793676 .

Monarch butterfly. Photo courtesy of Kathy Garvey.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Spring 2019

phenomenon of winter breeding. We documented a long monarch decline in the 90s and early 2000s. It was accompanied by a striking change in low-elevation breeding seasonality: the traditional early-season coastal and Central Valley breeding virtually disappeared – the butterflies seemingly continued eastward and bred in the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin instead – but then there was a hitherto-unknown surge in late-season breeding by the butterflies heading for the coast from August even into November. Then, during the 5-year “millennial” drought, monarch numbers went back up and the historic seasonal breeding rhythm returned. When the drought ended, numbers nose-dived, breeding resumed its pre-drought pattern, and we ended up with the 2018 disaster. But monarchs are supposed to react to the combination of shortening days and cooler nights in autumn by going into “reproductive diapause.” The females stop ovulating, the males aren’t interested in sex, and the butterflies overwintering in clusters along the coast don’t resume reproductive activity until

Continued from page 1.

(typically) February. That’s what always used to happen. But now an increasing percentage never go into reproductive diapause at all. They don’t join the clusters and they attempt to breed all winter. They can only do this using exotic (tropical) milkweeds in gardens near the coast, which don’t go winter-dormant like the native species do. There is no evidence that these plants induce winter breeding; they merely enable it.

I could go on (and on…), but the take-home is that we know much less about the monarch than you might think. For many insects we can use techniques like key-factor analysis and path analysis to identify the drivers of population dynamics, but these require what population biologists call “life-table” data, which we simply don’t have for the monarch. Without such data we are basically whistling in the dark.

Oh yes, “M” (*see at end).

Conservation organizations want their public to believe they are actually doing something (just like the Berlin police in “M”), and the public wants to feel that it is helping out. So we are being given lists of things we can do to “help save the monarch.” Foremost among these is “plant native milkweeds!” There is no reason to believe that or any of the other suggestions will do any good. On the other hand, they are unlikely to do any harm. So if it makes you feel better, go ahead and plant milkweed.

The police operations against street crime in “M” were irrelevant, but if you’ve seen the movie you know they ultimately, indirectly, solve the case. The petty criminals want to get the police off their backs, so they organize to track down and catch the killer themselves. And they succeed. If we are very lucky, maybe the recommendations we are getting from conservationists will somehow end up saving the day.

*”M” was a German drama-thriller about the actions of a serial killer and the manhunt for him. The 1931 movie was directed by Fritz Lang.-LSK

Monarch butterfly on butterfly bush. Photo courtesy of Kathy Garvey.

Overwintering monarch butterflies in the Berkeley Marina in 2015. Photo courtesy of Kathy Garvey.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Spring 2019

MORE MUSEUM HAPPENINGS

March 9 our weekend open house, Eight Legged Wonders, focused on spiders. It featured Jason Bond a new professor in the Entomology Department at UC Davis and his students. He hosted a slide show at 1 pm about studying spiders and we had cool specimens, interactive activities and take home crafts all focused on spiders. More than 200 visitors came to the event.

Our new tardigrade water bear hoodies are now available. We have three colors available now—dark red, black and

Water Bear Hoodies are Here!

Northern California Lepidopterists Meeting

Bohart Museum hoodies being modeled by Karissa Merritt (left) and Charlotte Herbert (right).

John Lane, Jerry Powell, John DeBenedictis, Val Albu and Bill Patterson. Photo by Kathy Garvey.

February 9 the Bohart Museum was the host for the annual Northern California Lepidopterists meeting. This group meets annually, alternating between the Essig Museum at UC Berkeley and the Bohart Museum.

Nearly 40 moth and butterfly specialists attended. They gave talks, shared notes, displayed specimens and told stories about their collections and collecting sites. A good time was had by all.

charcoal gray. As members you get a 15% discount in the gift shop.

You know you want one!

Spider Open House

Up-Coming Events Three major events are happening with the Bohart this year.

Entomology Reunion: March 31-April 2 the second Entomology reunion will be held on campus for everyone who graduated from the UCD Entomology Department or worked there.

Picnic Day: April 13 will be the 110th annual Picnic Day public open house at the University of California, Davis.

Lepidopterists Society meeting: July 9-12. This will be an international meeting of folks studying butterflies and moths. It will be held in Davis and will include events at the Bohart.

Calendar Coincidence

Society member Norm Smith noticed that the December 30 birth date of Frederick Smith on the 2019 Bohart Museum calendar was the same as Norm’s brother who’s name coinci-dentally was also Frederick Smith. The calendar Frederick Smith was a wasp and bee taxonomist at the British Mu-seum of Natural His-tory in the early 1800’s. Federick Smith.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Spring 2019

TAXONOMY FAIL INDEX

Alexander Wild (http://www.myrmecos.net/2010/09/09/taxonomy-fail-index/) has developed a clever metric for misidentified photos that he calls the Taxonomy Fail Index (TFI). We've all seen them, flies identified as honey bees and more. Some new examples are shown here. The TFI measures the amount of error in geological time against the error of misidentifying a human and a chimpanzee!!!. He proposed the following:

A = The actual taxon of the pictured organism.

B = The taxon as misidentified.

T = The number of million years since A and B shared a common ancestor.

H = The number of million years since humans and our closest relatives, the chimps, shared a common ancestor. Let's say this is 7 million years.

The TFI is calculated as T/H. Therefore, comparing a human with a chimpanzee is a TFI of 1. The opposite extreme would be the TFI for the most ancient vertebrate group, jawless fish, is 75,000,000! The TFI for the following images is:

1. Tick (A) identified as a flea (B): 400 mya = TFI of 57

2. Horsefly (A) identified as a flea (B): 200 mya = TFI of 29

3. Mantid (A) identified as a walking stick (B): 400 mya = TFI of 57

4. Crane fly (A) identified as a three name name (!) three TFI's for this one:

mosquito (B1): 120 mya = TFI 17

scorpion (B2): 430 mya = TFI 61

lacewing (B3): 170 mya = TFI 24

The average for No. 4 would be 34.

2.

3.

4.

1.

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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.

Antarctica Under Attack?

A flightless midge, Eretmoptera murphyi, native to South Georgia Island was inadvertently introduced to the South Orkneys islands in potted plant soil. This midge feeds on dead organic matter in moss and peat. This species reproduces asexually and no males are known. They only feed as larvae and can tolerate temperatures below -19°C (-2.2°F) as well as being frozen solid. They have no competition or predators, and it is feared that they will increase rates of nutrient cycling and litter turnover on the islands.

Lactating Spiders!

One thing about working on insects and their relatives is that there is always something new and surprising. The latest of these new discoveries was published by scientists at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in China. They found that female jumping spiders in the genus Toxeus create “nests” and feed their offspring a milk-like nutritional secretion from their epigastric fold on the underside of the abdomen. These females feed their off-spring until they are subadults, and adult female offspring are allowed to return to the nest.

Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Spring 2019

Correlation Versus Causation

For years some doctors have claimed that tick bites, primarily bites of the lone star tick, can lead to red meat allergies. Now, doctors at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina are suggesting that chigger bites can also cause red meat allergies. All of this is based on doctors asking patients with this allergy if they had eaten red meat hours earlier. These red meat allergies apparently take 3 to 6 hours to develop. These allergies are reported in the southeastern U.S.

There are a couple of problems with ticks and chigger mite bites causing these allergies. Most significantly there is no experimental evidence to support any of this. Given the abundance of lone star ticks in Texas, you would expect most Texans to have red meat allergies, but apparently the syndrome has not been reported in Texas. Finally, it is unlikely that a severe allergic reaction would take so many hours to occur.

Purple Floaters

Our purple springtails are back. Several folks in the local community found floating purple masses. These are mating swarms of springtails that form on the surface of puddles in late winter.

Lost and Found

There have been several spectacular insects rediscovered in the past year that hadn’t been seen for decades or even longer. These rediscovered insects are all large-bodied and often colorful. They are often described in press releases as species thought to be extinct, but the reality is that most of the regions where they occur are so poorly collected that that we simply don’t know what occurs there or when.

One of these, the Oriental blue clearwing moth (Heteropshecia tawonoides), was recently found in primary forest in peninsular Malaysia. The last time it was collected was in 1887.

In a similar situation, a team of scientists recently visited the North Moluccas in Indonesia and rediscovered the world’s largest bee, Megachile pluto. This bee was last collected in 1981. There are specimens of this huge bee in the American Museum of Natural History and British Museum of Natural History.

Lone star tick. Photo Credit: James Gathany, CDC. Wikipedia.

Adult midge on Signy Island. Photo credit: P. Bucktrout, British Antarctic Survey..

Wallace’s bee compared to a honey bee. Photo by Clay Bolt.

Oriental blue clearwing moth, Photo by Marta Skowron Volponi.

Purple springtails. Photo by gbrianbgat.

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

Picnic Day is coming!