University of California, Riverside No. 34, Winter 2011 Friends of the Entomology Research Museum ~~ ~~ Newsletter Editor: D. Yanega; Proofing Editors: G. Ballmer, D. Hawks *********************** FERM ANNUAL MEETING * FERM Officers * : President: Eugene Drake : Sat., January 29, 6 PM * Vice-president: John Hash * * Treasurer: Keve Ribardo * * Secretary: Serguei Triapitsyn * The 2011 Annual FERM meeting and Potluck * E-mails: * Dinner will be held on January 29th, a Saturday, at the * [email protected], [email protected], * U.C.R Entomology Bldg. foyer and large conference room. * [email protected] * Setup starts at 5:00pm * * Dinner at 6:00 *********************** Lecture at 7:00 ~. What to bring: something for yourself and 3 others. FERM:I Friends of the Entomology Research Mu- 12 FERM will provide cups, plates, utensils, some snacks, I seum is a UCR campus sponsored support group 12 drinks. I whose membership is open to students, faculty, 12 I staff, and the general public. Annual dues are ten 12 This year's Meeting will be headlined by Dr.Brian Idollars. Membership privileges include the annual I~ Brown from the LACM (Natural History Museum of Los 1meeting, newsletter, and other occasional meetings 2 Angeles County). The title for the talk will be: I and events including field trips and. lec:::Jres by entomologists and other naturalists. "Off with their heads: A new type of ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~flJL decapitation in the Phoridae (Diptera) and Newsletters Online! other novelties from recent research" Back issues of the FERM newsletter are now available for online viewing! They can be Dr. Brown is a native Canadian who obtained his accessed at the following URL: PhD at the University of Alberta under Dr. George Ball. After a two-year postdoc at the Smithsonian, he came to the http://entmuseum.ucr.edu/ LACM, where he has been a curator for the past 18 years. His research is on the systematics, phylogeny, and behavior join_us _ferm.htm of the incredibly diverse fly family Phoridae, especially the parasitoids known as ant-decapitating flies. He does much The FERM Newsletter is published approximately semi-annually and contains articles written by FERM members. If you would of his work in the tropics, and also works on fossil (amber) like to submit an article, please send it as a Word or RTF file phorids. He is the Head Editor for the recently-published using one of the foHowing two methods: (1) an attachment via 2-volume Manual of Central American Diptera. email to the editor (see below) or (2) a hard copy version on disk. Submissions will be published in the order they are received in accordance with space availability and relevancy to the FERM If you ever wanted to know how flies could general readership. lf you have questions please contact the decapitate fire ants, here's your big chance to get the inside FERM Newsletter editor, Doug Yanega: [email protected] scoop! Come meet our new FERM officers, too, and say farewell to the old ones. See you there! NEWS FROM THE MUSEUM by Doug Yanega, Senior Museum Scientist It's been a long while since the last newsletter (an unhappy trend), and quite a lot has happened over the past year. My colleague John Ascher (from the American Museum of Natural History in Noo Yawk) and Iwere awarded a 1.3 million-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a network of databases for 10 of the country's bee collections - UCR and the AMNH, plus UC Davis, UC Berkeley, the LACM, the California State Collection (in the CDFA facilities in Sacramento), Cornell, UConn, Utah State, and Rutgers. At UCR we had already databased some 70,000 ofTimberIake's bees, so we had a head start on our end, and what we have been doing on the new grant has been databasing other people's collections - UCR is the processing center for the LACM, the CSCA, and UC Berkeley, and we've been working on the bumblebees from these collections first. We've hired on Keve Ribardo, a former senior cur:atorial assistant at the California Academy of Sci- ences, to deal with the bulk of the specimen sorting and data entry, while Ido specimen identifications and error-checking. What has been done so far is all available online as part of the Discover Life website dataset, and we even have a FaceBook page fof the pro- ject, which is called DBCNet (for Digital Bee Collection Network). Chris (Topher) Jordan continues working on the slide-mounted parasitic wasps, and has even started in on some of the pinned material of the same groups represented on the slides (in some cases, specimens from the same exact series as the slide- mounted specimens; when you can have over lOOwasps emerge from a single host, one has many options). Various students, espe- cially Colin Umeda, have done a lot of work organizing and collating the teaching collection materials, and that all looks a lot better now. We still have our two "temporary" workers, Cole Watson and Jennifer Thieme, hard at work mounting and labelling our back- log of tiny specimens - working so hard, in fact, they have almost cleaned us out, and we're now struggling a little to get more specimens to put into the pipeline. We've also had a few great recent donations, notably from Gordon Pratt and Jeremiah George. The Museum's regular database has grown tremendously, as a result of all this, including many records of specimens that do not belong to us; we now have some 319,000 records, which is 66,000 new records since the last update, making it the biggest yearly increase since the database was begun in 2000. Speaking of substantial, the rain that we're having this winter promises to yield a few good field trips this spring (very much like last year), and we hope folks can get out and collect lots of insect specimens. @ ® FERM Annual 2010 - The year in review '·1 by Gene Drake For the 2010 Annual Meeting FERM member Dr. Gordon Pratt (who also happens to be a member of the University of California, Riverside associate staff) stepped forward and presented us with an interesting talk on the habitat re- quired and native plants utilized by the rare Quino Checkerspot Butterfly, Euphydryas editha quina. For those of you that didn't get to the meeting; the Quino Checkerspot larvae feed on Plantago and Orthocarpus plant species living on clay soils in open sunshine. In days of old to qualify as an expert, the speaker must have had several carousels of Kodachrome slides and travel more than 25 miles to get to the meeting. Gordon had the photos and they were taken more than 25 miles from the auditorium where the lecture was presented. By proclamation; Dr. Pratt is there- fore an expert on the topic. Gordon has published a few papers on the species, but that is beside the point. I for one had no idea that Quina Checkerspots would be interested in host plants at the 2 leaf/cotyledon stage of develop- ment. As FERM president, I wish to thank Dr. Pratt for an interesting presentation. With Dr. Pratt volunteering to do the annual guest speaker address at the FERM dinner, we were able to save the cost of bringing a speaker from a distant land. Yes, FERM's budget is still not quite enough to bring speakers from distant lands. We have enough to print the newsletters and run the annual meetings, but not a whole lot more, and we have not seen a major bank balance change in several years. Ifwe attempted to put on an annual meeting in the style of old and bring a speaker from Arizona, Nevada or northern California (nearly anywhere that required a plane ticket) we could be bankrupt at the end of the meeting. The minimum FERM renewal of $10 does not really allow grant funding of trips for graduate student to finish their thesis. FERM purchased a microscope 4 or 5 years ago that has been used regularly by visiting professionals to prepare notes for their projects. That was a great purchase, and hopefully some day we'll be in a position to do that sort of thing again. We've also benefited a great deal from being able to hire student helpers in the museum, but that used up much of the nest-egg. Unfortunately due to the eco- nomic situation, donations to FERM are recently few and far between. Funding for graduate student trips was put on hold and willcontinue so unless something changes drastically. Some years are simply not vintage years in the in- sect business or any other business; unfortunately, with the Governor's new budget cutting deep into the University, 2011 might not be an improvement. 2 A Dominican Adventure by John Heraty The Commonwealth of Dominica is a small island in the Lesser Antilles, a mere 291 square miles, but a luxurious Caribbean island with tremendous topographical and ecological diversity. Nicknamed the "nature island", this is one of the youngest islands in the Antilles that still retains some volcanic activity; it attains a height of 1447 meters at the peak of Mount Diablotins and is traversed by a network of trails and reserves that make it accessible for collecting, and importantly, you can actually get an official collecting per- mit (at a fair price and with a research application). With a population of just over 70,000 people, the island also remains one of the most unspoiled habitats in the Caribbean. So, why were we there in May 2010? A "team" of John Heraty, Elizabeth Murray (PhD, UCR), Laura Varone (USDA Bio- logical Control Laboratory, Hurlingham, Argentina) and Brendan Morris (undergraduate, Texas A&M) had their second chance on the island to study the biology ofthe eucharitid parasitoid, Orasema minutissima, which attacks the Little Red Fire Ant, Wasmannia auropunctata.