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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 [email protected].
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:[email protected]
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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