Meeting 1178 Minutes

Minutes from the 1178th Meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club

President Nate Edelman called the 1178th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club to order at 7:35 pm on Tuesday, December 13th in MCZ 101. Approximately 20 members and guests were in attendance.

New business:

Emily Mienecke was nominated for membership.

Daniel Peterson, PhD candidate at UMass Amherst, discussed his work in a talk entitled Specialization and trade-offs in plant-feeding insects.
Most herbivorous insects are limited to one or a few closely related host-plant species. This widespread specialization may be favored by natural selection if performance trade-offs limit the use of multiple distinct hosts, but evidence for such trade-offs has been difficult to find. Daniel is investigating adaptive trade-offs by comparing host-use across insect species. Using data from systematic surveys of armored scale insect host-use in tropical rainforest canopies Panama and Malaysia, as well as digitized museum collections of Hemiptera and Lepidoptera specimens, his work suggests that non-adaptive processes may play a bigger role than trade-offs in the long-term evolution of host-use among plant-feeding insects.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:55pm for discussion and refreshments.

Respectfully submitted,

Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary