Superorganisms, mimicry and aphids...

Those are some of the topics to be covered at the UC Davis Department of Entomology's fall noonhour seminars, to begin Wednesday, Oct. 17 and continue through Wednesday, Nov. 28 in Room 1022 of the Life Sciences Building.

Assistant professors Joanna Chiu and Brian Johnson of the UC Davis Department of Entomology are coordinating the fall noonhour seminars.

All seminars will be held every Wednesday except for Nov. 14. No seminar will be held that day. That's during the Entomological Society of America's annual meeting, which will take place Nov. 11-14 in Knoxville, Tenn.

The good news is that if you cannot attend these seminars, not to worry. Professor James R. Carey is arranging the videotaping of the seminars. They will be be broadcast at a later date on UCTV. Meanwhile, if you missed any of the previous ones, most can be accessed on UCTV.

For free.

The lineup for the fall seminars:

Oct. 17:  Tim Linksvayer, assistant professor, University of Pennsylvania.
Title: "Colony-Level Social Insect Gene Regulatory Networks"
Host: Brian Johnson, assistant professor of entomology 

Oct. 24: Micky Eubanks, professor, Texas A&M University
Title: "Community Ecology of a "Pest": Aphids Rule their World via Powerful Indirect Effects"
Host: Graduate student Billy Kimmel

Oct. 31: Sarjeet Gill, professor, UC Riverside
Title: "Bacterial Toxins in Disease Mosquito Vector Control"
Host: Bruce Hammock, distinguished professor of entomology 

Nov. 7:  Taro Ohkawa, postdoctoral researcher, UC Berkeley
Title: "Baculovirus Manipulation of the Host Actin Cytoskeleton: Roles in Entry and Egress"
Host: George Kamita from the Bruce Hammock lab 

Nov. 14: No seminar this week (Entomological Society of America's annual meeting)

Nov. 28: James Mallet, professor, Harvard University
Title: "Hybridization, Mimicry and the Origin of Species in Heliconius
Butterflies"
Host: Gregory Lanzaro, professor, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine

The first speaker, evolutionary biologist Tim Linksvayer, will focus on superorganisms. Honey bees are considered superorganisms.

"Individuals in insect societies are inextricably linked by social interactions,” Linksvayer writes in his abstract. “Colony-level social networks coordinate individual function and colony homeostasis just as physiological networks coordinate tissue function and homeostasis within individuals. As a result, social insect colonies are often described as ‘superorganisms’ composed of organisms that function together more-or-less as a unit. This characteristic is thought to have led to the remarkable ecological and evolutionary success of the social insects.

"Despite these conspicuous superorganismal properties and the inherent hierarchical organization of life in insect societies (i.e. colony-level, organismal-level), most previous studies of the evolutionary genetic and molecular basis of social insect traits use the same reductionist approaches that have been developed for solitary organisms, where an individual’s traits are only influenced by its own genome. More realistically, in social organisms, an individual’s traits are the property of the genomes of all social group members. I will discuss ongoing integrative research studying how social interactions in ants and honey bees affect the expression and evolution of individual- and group-level traits."

Stay tuned!