New to US: Hornets that butcher bees and sting people. Humans are fighting back.

tomwt — Thu, 23 May 2024 21:28:54 +0000

New to US: Hornets that butcher bees and sting people. Humans are fighting back. tomwt Thu, 05/23/2024 - 14:28 More CNAS in the Media Hannah Hoag | Knowable Magazine May 23, 2024

USA TODAY - In August 2023, a beekeeper near the port of Savannah, Georgia, noticed that something odd was hunting his honeybees. Black with bright yellow legs, the flying insect would hover at the hive entrance, capture a flying honeybee and butcher it before darting off with the bee’s thorax, the meatiest bit.

“He’d only been keeping bees since March … but he knew enough to know that something wasn’t right,” said Lewis Bartlett, an ecologist at the University of Georgia, who helped investigate. Bartlett had seen these honeybee hunters before, during his PhD studies in England a decade earlier. The dreaded yellow-legged hornet had arrived in North America.

“They eat everything,” says ecologist Erin Wilson-Rankin of the University of California, Riverside, who has studied invasive social wasps for nearly 20 years. “They don’t specialize. They’ll eat caterpillars, aphids, flies, the whole gamut of arthropods.”

This story was produced by Knowable Magazine.

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Here’s a great new tool to help protect butterflies in your area

tomwt — Mon, 13 May 2024 14:55:25 +0000

Here’s a great new tool to help protect butterflies in your area tomwt Mon, 05/13/2024 - 07:55 More CNAS in the Media Kurt Snibbe | The Press-Enterprise May 09, 2024

THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE - A look at our local Lepidoptera (butterfly and moth) species and share some tips on how to protect them.

New conservation tool
One of the ways you could help butterflies and moths in your local area is by creating a space with plants they are attracted to. Chris Cosma, a recent Ph.D. graduate from UC Riverside and now at the Conservation Biology Institute, created an online tool that lets you enter your ZIP code (or address) and the Butterfly Net shows the best native plant species to use in your area. The site works for all of California and ranks the value as host and nectar plants for local butterflies and moths. Some plants can attract dozens of insect species.

Check it out: ctcosma.shinyapps.io/the_butterfly_net

When it comes to creating plantscapes that help, another UC Riverside entomologist, Erin Wilson Rankin said, “In garden settings, a diversity of sages (we like to use a mix of black sage, hummingbird sage and Sonoma sage) and mallows (chaparral mallow, desert mallow, and Indian mallow). California buckwheat is a pollinator crowd pleaser, as is encelia. For trees/shrubs, lemonadeberry and sugarbush are great nectar plants.”

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WHO’S EATING WHO?

edraws — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 18:39:59 +0000

WHO’S EATING WHO? edraws Wed, 02/23/2022 - 10:39 More College News Jules Bernstein | UCR Magazine February 23, 2022

You never forget the moment when your path in life becomes clear. For Erin Wilson-Rankin, that moment came in an undergraduate classroom at Georgetown University when she learned about a caterpillar that evades predators by flinging its poop.

“It was actually my professor, Martha Weiss, talking about her own research into the silver-spotted skipper butterfly that grabbed me,” Wilson-Rankin said. “As a caterpillar, it shoots its poop so as to keep its leaf shelter clean and not attract natural enemies.”

Wilson-Rankin was hooked. She joined the Weiss laboratory shortly thereafter and started working on a study of how predatory wasps can overcome the leaf shelter defenses of their caterpillar prey.

“The interactions between predators and prey, and between herbivores and plants, really sparked my interest,” she said.

Today, Wilson-Rankin is an associate professor in UC Riverside’s Department of Entomology. Her laboratory is focused on food webs, or the science of who’s eating who — which insects and animals are predators, which ones are prey, and how these roles affect the environment around them. This research is arguably more critical now than ever before. With the rapidly increasing destruction of natural habitat, time is running out to understand the complex ways that insect and animal species work together.

“By understanding food webs, we can essentially start to understand life itself,” she said. “Survival is predicated on having enough to eat and having successful strategies for finding food. Knowing the strategies that insects and other animals use can tell us about the basic requirements for healthy communities of creatures.”

Though the more serious and urgent need to understand our changing environment is at the heart of Wilson-Rankin’s work, so is the excitement of learning about the strange creatures we coexist with but rarely see in detail. Her current collaborative study of large, invasive Asian and European praying mantises is a perfect example of this duality. Both species consume beneficial insects such as pollinators and may soon become recognized as major pests. The study, led by biology professor Jessie Knowlton at Wheaton College, is trying to answer the question of whether these non-native insects are negatively affecting North American agriculture or ecology.

To answer it, the group collected specimens in Massachusetts. Wilson- Rankin is now analyzing the contents of the mantis guts, performing molecular analysis of what’s in their diet. On average, the mantises are between 3.5 to 5 inches tall, which is huge for mantids, she said. One additional factor makes them even more astonishing.

“These are one of the only insects that can look over their own shoulder,” she said. “When they’re eating something between their forelegs that have raptor-like grabbing appendages, they can peek back at you. It’s pretty creepy actually!”

Wilson-Rankin is also researching hummingbirds because they compete with insects for flower nectar and are major insect predators. In a recent study, she and her team discovered that, contrary to popular belief, the tiny birds have an active sense of smell that they use to avoid danger as well as to locate prey. The findings were exciting, she said, because they constitute the first clear demonstration of hummingbirds using their sense of smell alone to make foraging decisions and avoid contact with potentially dangerous insects at a flower or feeder. One particularly important facet of their diets is insects that humans consider pests, like aphids, psyllids, and midges.

(UCR/Stan Lim)

“I think most people are shocked to find out that hummingbirds are little flying insect vacuums. They eat any tiny fly, gnat, or nit, and a lot of them,” she said, adding gardeners should attempt to cultivate hummingbirds. “They can do a number on small insects and help keep some of your other garden pests at bay. Attract them, and you’ll get excellent pest control services.”

Another current project finds Wilson-Rankin raising western yellowjacket wasps. Native to North America, they are not as aggressive as some of their sister species, she said. The species is unlikely to nest in human structures, like garages, and they aren’t likely to attack.

“If you run over them with a lawnmower, you’ll upset them, but they’re not defensive when foraging unless you put your hand down on one,” she said. “They’re not intentionally trying to sting you.”

Wilson-Rankin believes this wasp is probably the most important predatory wasp in Southern California, serving as a source of bird food as well as population control for other insects. Some of the colonies can have as many as 1,000 workers, with nests the size of a football, she said. It’s unknown why some of these gigantic colonies only appear annually, while others make it through the winter, becoming perennial. Her laboratory is looking at genetic as well as climate factors and food availability, but they aren’t yet sure what controls it.

Ultimately, Wilson-Rankin hopes others are inspired by the same combination of fascination and awe that has motivated her own research into insect food webs. She said anyone can join an international community of insect lovers, and several websites and apps now exist where members of the public can make observations or take photos of insects, plants, or birds, aiding experts in identifying and categorizing species.

“You don’t actually have to collect anything, and you don’t have to identify things yourself,” she said. “With the advent of community science platforms like iNaturalist, any person can contribute to the greater body of ecological knowledge, and I do hope that they will.”

This article originally appeared in UCR Magazine Winter 2022