In This Issue

Bohart Museum Society

Winter 2019 Newsletter No. 77

Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2019

SPOTLIGHT ON A SPECIES

Cats, Rats and Fleas, Oh No!

By Lynn S. Kimsey

In the twenty-first century we tend to think of fleas, if we think about them at all, as a problem pretty much restricted to pet owners. However, more than a century ago fleas were very much on everyone's minds in California because of two plague outbreaks in San Francisco around the time of the 1908 earthquake. During these outbreaks the plague pathogen was probably primarily transmitted by rat fleas, Xenopsylla cheopis, and to a lesser extent by the cat flea,

Ctenocephalides felis. Although today plague transmission by fleas seems to be a minor issue in California, there are other potential disease issues associated with fleas, such as murine typhus. Today, growing flea populations are rapidly becoming an urban pest issue with potentially significant consequences for public health.

Fleas belong to the order Siphonaptera. The adults of both sexes are obligatory blood feeders with short tubular mouthparts but the larvae are scavengers. Female fleas take about 25 minutes to complete a blood meal, whereas males generally feed for half that time. Mating takes place on the host. After a full blood meal females produce 20-30 tiny ovoid white eggs, which are dispersed in the vicinity of the host. A single female flea can produce up to 8,000 eggs in her lifetime! The eggs hatch in 2-7 weeks depending on the temperature. However, not all of the eggs are viable and the inviable ones may be consumed by the caterpillar-like flea larvae from eggs that do hatch. Indoors, fleas lay their eggs in and around places where pets feed and sleep and this is where larval fleas are found. The larvae feed on very different materials than the adults, including host skin flakes, shed hair, flea droppings, and non-viable flea eggs. Development time is temperature and humidity dependent, with development times decreasing as temperatures warm. The pupal stage lasts a week or so. Emergence from the pupa is triggered by changes in light, vibrations, ro increases in warmth and CO2. These are signals to the eclosing adults that a potential host is

2,000 cat fleas from an office floor in San Francisco this fall. Photo by Bruce Baznik.

Continued on page 4.

CONTENTS

Directors Note 1

Spotlight on a Species 1

Museum News 2

Museum Happenings 5

Museum Comings & Goings 6

Ask the Bug Doctor 7

San Francisco public health service workers holding buckets filled with rat bait after the 1908 earthquake.

I want to thank you all for your incredible generosity. We’ve had a tremendous outpouring of support for the coming year. This will make it possible for us to train more students and expand our curation and outreach programs.

We have great things planned for 2019, including expanded weekend open houses, more summer Bio Boot Camp sessions for junior high and high school kids and new exhibits.

Please visit us at Biodiversity Museum Day, Feb. 16. We’ve expanded the program activities and have more collections open than ever before.

-Lynn Kimsey

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2019

MUSEUM NEWS

The hallway outside the museum now features two brand new exhibits. This fall we installed an awesome photograph taken by Levon Biss in time for our annual Halloween open house. Biss is an artist working in England who takes remarkably high resolution images of sometimes tiny insects. This particular wasp, a female Parnopes grandior Pallas (family Chrysididae), is only about 1 cm long yet you can see every pit and hair.

Levon Biss works as a news and sports reporter as well as taking portraits and very high resolution images of insects. His photographic process involves taking a large number of images, using multiple lighting setups, to create the final insect photograph. Our particular image is a composite of over 8,000 separate images.

The printing and installation of the

photo was done by PiP Printing of West Sacramento.

We also added a display of Mary Foley Benson’s detailed water colors in the hallway.

Mary F. Benson was a gifted water colorist. She graduated from the National School of Fine and Applied Art and later studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA.

She specialized in detailed, realistic

New Exhibits

paintings of plants, landscapes and insects.

Mary Benson was a pilot prior to World War II and flew as an officer in the Army Air Corps during the war. After the war she worked as an illustrator for the US Department of Agriculture, housed at the U. S. Natural History Museum, in Washington, DC. She later moved to the West Coast and established a studio in Hollywood. In 1964 she moved to Davis, CA where she illustrated insects and their host plants for several entomologists at the University of California, including W. Harry Lange, Richard M. Bohart and Howard

McKenzie. She produced many color plates for the book, Mealybugs of California by McKenzie and the frontispiece for Sphecid Wasps of the World by Bohart. Mary Benson’s illustrations are widely published and her work has been shown in numerous art galleries.

Installation of the Levon Biss photograph by PiP Printing (left), and Lynn Kimsey showing off the final image

(right). Photos by Lynn Kimsey (left) and Kathy Garvey (right).

Levon Biss photographing an insect. Photo from You Tube.

A visitor to the museum viewing several of Mary Foley Benson’s. Photo by Kathy Garvey.

A young Mary Foley Benson painting in 1927.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2018

MUSEUM NEWS

Larry Allen

Anonymous

Larry G. Bezark

Dustin Blakey

Suzanne & Hank Borenstein

Larry Bronson

Janice Caravantes

Tali Cohen

Helen Court

E. Dashiell

Stephanie & Krishna Dole

Mark Eberle

John Edman

David Faulkner

Marian H. Frazier

Larry French

Chris Deidrick

Raymond Gill

Albert A. Grigarick

Eric E. Grissell

Jeff Halstead

Linda Haque

Ann Harman

Cole Hawkins

Henry Hespenheide

Larry Hummer

Mike and Bonnie Irwin

Gary Ling & Deanna Jackson

John Kirchner

Gary May

Arnold Menke

Doug Miller

Chester Moore

Leonette Morrison

Barbara Murphy

Bill Patterson

Helen North Root

Nathan Schiff

Sandra S. Shanks

Sheryl Soucy-Lubell

Jim Tassano

Catherine Tauber

Laurel Walters

Philip S. Ward

Marius & Joanne Wasbauer

David Wyatt

Tom Zavortink

Financial Donors

Thanks to Our Donors in 2018!

Biodiversity Day is Coming Soon!

Albert Carranza

Bob Dowell

Henry Hespenheide

Daniel Lee

Arnold Menke

Richard Meyer

William (Randy) Miller

George Okumura

Jeff Smith

Norman Smith

Don Strong

David Verity

Bill Wisseman

Please join us Saturday, February 16 for the eighth annual Biodiversity Museum Day at the UC Davis campus. This year 13 museums and collections will be open to the public, some for the first time. You will be able to visit the Anthropology Museum, Bohart Museum of Entomology, Botanical Conservatory, Center for Plant Diversity Herbarium, Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, Marine Invertebrate Collection, Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, Nematode Collection, Paleontology Collection, Phaff Yeast Culture, and Viticulture & Enology Culture Collections, Raptor Center and UC Davis Arboretum.

The Marine Invertebrate collection will be open to the public for the first time during this event. For more information and maps to the collections please visit the Biodiversity Museum Day website:

http://biodiversitymuseumday.ucdavis.edu/

Specimen Donors

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2019

nearby. The newly emerged adult jumps on the new host and begins feeding immediately.

Globally, the most important ectoparasite of cats and dogs is the cat flea. Although they're called cat fleas these parasites are not particularly host specific and will happily feed on dogs, rats, humans and opossums, in addition to cats. They have also been found on sheep, rabbits, foxes, gazelles, grizzly bears, skunks and even water buffalo!

Murine typhus is a human disease caused by the pathogen Rickettsia typhi and to a lesser extent Rickettsia felis. Rodents, particularly rats, are the normal hosts of Rickettsia typhi. Today the disease is found around the world in port cities and suburbs where roof and sewer rats are common. In the U.S. human cases of murine typhus are found primarily in suburban areas of Texas and California. In most regions, this pathogen is primarily vectored within rat populations by fleas. In the U.S. the most important reservoir species in this cycle appear to be opossums and feral cats, in addition to rats, and the principle vector is the cat flea. The pathogen is most likely to be transmitted via flea feces that are ingested or inhaled. For unknown reasons the majority of human cases of murine typhus in the U.S. occur in spring and summer in California and in the summer and fall in Texas.

The bacteria that cause murine typhus in humans do not appear to cause disease in other animals in the transmission cycle. However, in humans the infection results in fever and chills, body aches and muscle pain, rashes and nausea.

Continued from page 1.

Although most people will recover without treatment, the disease can be severe and cause organ damage. It is generally treated with antibiotics.

Typhus has been found in the Los Angeles region for at least three decades, with 500 human cases reported during this period. However, the number of human cases doubled in 2018, with twenty in Pasadena and twelve in Long Beach. Public health authorities in the Los Angeles basin demonstrated a direct association between rates of transmission, the size of the feral cat population and the termination of rat control programs funded by the federal government.

Californians have a great affection for cats and this sometimes translates into the care and feeding of feral cats. In the greater Los Angeles region there are estimates of between one and three million feral cats or roughly one cat for every four humans in the Los Angeles area. There are individuals who spend hours providing food and water for feral cats at regular feeding sites. These feeding sites are often on public land, like parks and school grounds and they may attract dozens of cats. Public land is chosen because of the legal ramifications of doing feeding on private land to the landowner.

There are a number of problems created by using public land for feeding cats. First is that it leads to large flea populations in the vicinity of the feeding station. This in turn exposes unaware members of the public to flea bites and

whatever pathogens the fleas might be carrying. The issue is so serious that Los Angeles Unified School District specifically bans feeding cats on school grounds due to the risks of exposing children to fleas infected with typhus and other pathogens, such as toxoplasmosis, which is also spread in cat feces. Toxoplasmosis is particularly dangerous to pregnant women.

Another unintended consequence of large numbers of cats is that both the feeding stations and the resulting large volume of cat feces in the vicinity become food for other animals. Cats don't always eat all of the food put out for them and what they leave is scavenged by other animals, including rats and possums. Ironically, cat feces are high in protein and are eaten by other animals including dogs, racoons and possums. Thus, the more cats being fed in an environment the more possums you will have as well. As you can see this creates a dangerous cycle and one that can put humans at risk.

The take home message from all of this is that it is never wise to tolerate large numbers of ectoparasites, and fleas in particular have well-demonstrated abilities to vector some very dangerous pathogens. Much as we feel the need to take care of wild pet or native animals we must realize that there are always unintended consequences to doing so. So far there have been no reported cases of murine typhus in northern California, but this may just be a matter of time.

Feral cats in New Brunswick. Photo by Bobby Haven, The Brunswick News.

Cat flea Ctenocephalides felix. by Karissa Merritt.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2019

MUSEUM HAPPENINGS

The Bohart Museum 2019 calendar has arrived and is available for either a donation or membership of $50 or more, or via the donate button on the Bohart website: bohart.ucdavis.edu.

The calendar features 12 whimsical illustrations of curious sentences from actual student term papers. Some of the sentences illustrated by Karissa Merritt in the calendar are:

“The infected fleas can harbor rats, ground squirrels, rabbits, and occasionally, even house cats.”

"In addition to a food product, pollinators are also used to pollinate crops.”

"Normally, locusts are introverted creatures; they do not socialize unless it is for reproduction.”

"Drones are male bees that contribute only in the perm production for the queen."

The Bohart Museum of Entomology hosted an open house on Sunday, November 18. It was all about Urban Entomology and Karey Windbiel-Rojas, the Associate Director for Urban and Community IPM for the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources Program, was a special guest. Despite the wildfire caused smoke and ash conditions in the area 90 people visited the museum from all over, including the San Francisco Bay Area.

Urban Entomology Open House

New Faces in the Museum

Emma Cluff blow drying and fluffing a bumblebee. Photo by Lynn Kimsey.

um

Karey Windbiel cockroaching in her cockroach costume for Jeff Smith at the urban insects open house. Photo by Tabatha Yang.

Sophia Lonchar is our new high school intern from The Met Sacramento High School. Sophia is helping out with a pollinator project but her internship project is to learn how to identify the pseudoscorpions of California.

Pseudoscorpions are small to tiny arachnids that look like oddly proportioned tailless scorpions.

Sophia and Brennen Dyer took high resolution images of larger specimens using the GigaMacro imaging system.

Sofia Lonchar above and pseudoscorpion photograph by Sophia Lonchar and Brennen Dyer.

2019 Calendar

Museum Weirdness

As part of a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service we identified bees from a pollinator study they did in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. However all of the specimens were collected in alcohol.

Bees in alcohol look a bit like wet long-haired dogs. So Emma Cluff developed a technique to blow-dry and fluff their hair. For a while the museum has become a hair salon for dead bees...

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2019

MUSEUM COMINGS & GOINGS

In November three of the museum graduate students, Jessica Gillung, Charlotte Herbert and Socrates Letana attended the ninth International Congress of Dipterology in Windhoek, Namibia in southwestern Africa. They all gave talks or presented posters at the conference and got to spend a week exploring the countryside and doing some collecting.

This was the first experience in Africa for all of them, and they were impressed by how different the desert and savannah habits were from other regions they’ve visited.

Jessica not only organized one of the workshops but her presentation won first prize for the best student presentation at the meeting.

Shortly after the congress Jessica completed her Ph.D. thesis and was due to leave for a postdoctoral position at Cornell University where she’s working with Brian Danforth. As a result she’s

moving from studying acrocerid flies to studying bees and the evolution of pollen feeding.

Before she left we threw a good-bye party for her and her husband Amir. It was attended by the museum staff, students, colleagues from the California Department of Food & Agriculture and entomology faculty. We gave “Jessicle” and Amir an L.L. Bean gift card because we were pretty sure they would be needing cold weather gear.

New Slide Cabinets

The museum tardigrade (water bear) specimens are all mounted on glass slides in Hoyer’s mounting medium. Hoyer’s is a water soluble medium, so the specimens must be stored horizontally.

As part of our NSF tardigrade grant we purchased two new steel cabinets to house the rest of the collection. The cabinets finally arrived early in December.

The cabinets are state of the art. Each holds 26,000 glass slides, which will house the remainder of the slides.

What we hadn’t anticipated was that each cabinet weighed 2,100 lbs! It took four men to get the cabinets off the delivery truck and moved into new museum space in the basement of

Briggs Hall.

Campus movers moving one of the cabinets into place. Photo by Brennen Dyer.

Comings & Goings

Jessica Gillung being awarded first prize for her talk at the International Congress of Dipterology.

Good-bye party for Jessica and Amir, with Tabatha Yang giving them a card from the museum, with Phil Ward and Andrew Young looking on. Photo by Kathy Garvey.

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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.

Fleas, Fleas and More Fleas

This tale of woe comes to us from Bruce Baznik, Integrated pest Control Coordinator for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Folks working

in a basement office at Fort Mason in San Francisco found themselves working in very difficult conditions. The office floor was literally hoping with fleas. Since there were no pets or other animals in the building, where were the fleas coming from? A sticky card placed in the room caught more than 2,000 fleas in one week! The fleas turned out to be cat fleas (Ctenocephalis felis). So then the question became who or what was the source and how were the animals getting into the building?

They finally discovered that raccoons were living in the utility chase along the ceiling at the back of the room. The raccoons were clearly the source of the fleas, but they have yet to discover how the raccoons get into the utility chase.

Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Winter 2019

Dragonflies Blowing Bubbles

Roanne Frerejean asked us why this dragonfly produced a bubble of liquid from its mouth and why it had a black spot on its eye. None of our experts knew for sure but Rosser Garrison suggested that the “adult may simply be regurgitating a droplet--perhaps due to breathing contractions of the abdomen.” and that “The "black-eye" is not a black eye at all--it's the "pseudopupil" that is characteristic of many insects with compound eyes (mantids often look like they are looking directly at you). The pseudopupil will "follow" you as you rotate your view because you are looking directly into the depth of the eye facets ... at that angle.”

Fishing Mantids

We all know that mantids are pred-ators, but we usually assume that they prey on other insects and rarely the occasional small bird. However, just this year an article was published in the Journal of Orthoptera Research describing an observation of a male mantid catching and eating guppies from an artificial pond on a roof garden in India.

Tarantula Time

The fall is the time when tarantulas become really obvious as males search for female tarantulas in northern

California. According to our new spider expert Jason Bond, the tarantula spotted by Brady Tucker near his house in El Dorado Hills, is Aphonopelma johnnycashi. El Dorado Hills is ironically not far from Folsom Prison. The species was described by Dr. Bond and his students.

Shamrock Orb Weaver

The photo of this colorful orb weaver (Araneus trifolium) was sent to us by Brian McDermott for identification. We’d never seen this one before and were impressed by the banded legs and strawberry-like abdomen.

Fort Mason flea room. Photo courtesy of Bruce Baznik.

Dragonfly blowing a bubble. Photo courtesy of Roanne Frerejean.

Male tarantula looking for love in El Dorado Hills.

Shamrock orb weaver. Photo courtesy of Brian McDermott.

mailto:bmuseum@ucdavis.edu

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

Don’t miss the fun

UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day! February 16, 2019