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StumbleUponPosts Tagged: Gary Zamzow
The Mighty Monarch
We're accustomed to seeing a solitary monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) flitting around a garden.
But millions of them?
It was interesting to read the National Public Radio piece (Oct. 4) on Flight: A Few Million Little Creatures That Could.
The feature news story traces how a "young boy in Canada wondered where butterflies go in the winter--and spend 40 years trying to answer that question."
"In 1973, Dr. Fred Urquhart--all grown up by then--placed an ad in a newspaper in Mexico looking for volunteers to tag and observe butterflies and find their destination."
A woman and her husband answered the ad, and in the course of two years, found "hundreds of millions of butterflies."
Monarch sanctuaries!
If you access the NPR website, you'll see clips of a documentary made by Mike Slee. It's called the "Flight of the Butterflies," which NPR describes as a "3-D IMAX film about the migration of the monarchs to sanctuaries."
"What you see, you can't imagine nature ever being like this," Slee tells NPR. "Trees that are draped — that are made, almost, of butterflies. It's got a surreal, supernatural feeling to it. It sends a sort of tingle up your spine when you see it in 3-D. And then they wake up and they all begin to fly."
NPR goes on to say that "the migration of the monarch butterfly is a staggering natural phenomenon. It takes two or three generations for the creatures to make their way north to Canada — but then one 'supergeneration' makes the 2,000-mile trip back to Mexico for the winter."
At UC Davis, emeritis professor Hugh Dingle is a noted authority on the migration of animals. He's been featured in National Geographic and other magazines. The good news is that he's writing the second edition of his popular textbook, Migration: The Biology of Life on the Move (Oxford University Press).
Dingle, who is headquartered in the Sharon Lawler lab in the UC Davis Department of Entomology, was featured in the National Geographic magazine's cover story, "Mysteries of Great Migrations."
He was quoted in a LiveScience news story on “Why Do Animals Migrate?”
Excellent information!
Frankly, we don't see as many monarchs as we'd like to. Seeing even one monarch "sends a tingle up the spine."
Plant and insect enthusiast Gary Zamzow of Davis--and an excellent photographer--recently planted some milkweed (the monarch's host plant) in the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, a pollinator friendly garden located next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road, UC Davis.
Hopefully, the milkweeds will attract many of those mighty monarchs next year and send lots of "tingles up the spine."
Monarch butterfly nectaring a Mexican sunflower (Tithonia). (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
'Oh, Is This One of Your Bees?'
The photo just begs for a caption.
The praying mantis, with a female sweat bee grasped in its spiked forelegs, suddenly turns its head to look at the photographer.
Actually, three photographers: Davis insect photographers/bee enthusiasts Allan Jones and Gary Zamzow and I. We were shooting images in the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, the half-acre bee friendly garden located next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road, UC Davis.
Jones, admiring the first image (below), commented "I love the way the mantis has set breakfast aside to stare directly at you." With that, Jones served up three captions:
"Oh, is that your bee?"
"What are you looking at?"
"Threat or prey?"
Meanwhile, we were obviously interrupting the praying mantid's bee breakfast.
"The female sweat bee is carrying some pollen she toiled to provide for her young," said native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology at the UC Davis Department of Entomology. "The mantid is also ducking under a spider webline, and needs to be careful that it does not become the meal of another sit and wait predator. It's a real jungle out there!"
Thorp, who has been monitoring the garden since October 2009, a year before it was planted, has so far discovered 75 different species of bees--and counting.
Yes, sometimes amid the predators and the prey, it's definitely a "real jungle out there."
What are you looking at? A praying mantis, with a female sweat bee grasped in its spiked forelegs, looks at the camera. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Praying mantis continues to eat the sweat bee. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
In Pursuit of Rare Bumble Bees
It's good to see University of California scientists pursuing rare bumble bees.
The latest news on the bumble bee front: UC Riverside scientists recently rediscovered "Cockerell's Bumble Bee" (Bombus cockerelli Franklin), considered "the rarest of the rare" species of bumble bee in the United States.
It hadn't been seen since 1956. Then, on Aug. 31, 2011 UC Riverside scientists collected the species on weeds along a highway north of Cloudcroft in the White Mountains of south-central New Mexico.
In a Dec. 5th press release, UC Riverside senior museum scientist Douglas Yanega told senior pubic information officer Iqbal Pittalwala: "Most bumble bees in the U.S. are known from dozens to thousands of specimens, but not this species. The area it occurs in is infrequently visited by entomologists, and the species has long been ignored because it was thought that it was not actually a genuine species, but only a regional color variant of another well-known species."
Fast-forward to UC Davis Department of Entomology where native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology, is pursuing the critically imperiled--and maybe extinct--Franklin's bumble bee (Bombus franklini Frison).
Thorp hasn't seen Franklin's bumble bee since 2006. Its range is a 13,300-square-mile area in Siskiyou and Trinity counties in California, and Jackson, Douglas and Josephine counties in Oregon. Up until now, its habitat was thought to be the smallest of any other bumble bee in the world.
Yanega believes that the range of the Cockerell's bumble bee is the smallest in the world. It's less than 300 square miles, he says.
Davis bumble bee enthusiast Gary Zamzow (he studies and photographs bumble bees and is a volunteer in the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven at UC Davis), says the latest find is "an exciting discovery and encouraging news. Gives one hope in finding lost bumble bees."
And an interesting note: Henry James Franklin (1883-1958), who monographed the bumble bees of North and South America in 1912-13, named both of them. Franklin named Cockerell's bumble bee for Theodore Dru Allison Cockerell (1866-1948).
Cockerell’s bumble bee. (Photo by Greg Ballmer, UC Riverside)
The criticallly imperiled Franklin's bumble bee. (Photo by Robbin Thorp, UC Davis)
