Meeting 1156 Minutes

Minutes from the 1156th Meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club

President Bruno de Medeiros called the 1156th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club to order at 7:40 pm on Tuesday, February 11th in MCZ 101, 26 Oxford St. Approximately 20 members and guests were in attendance.

New business:
Jeremiah Sullivan was nominated for membership
Marianne Espeland, a postdoctoral fellow in the Pierce lab at Harvard, was the February speaker.

Her talk was entitled From host plants to host ants: phyto-predation and phylogeny of Lepidochrysops butterflies and relatives.

Most Lepidoptera species are phytophagous. Around 500 species (less than 1%) are aphytophagous and feed mainly on other insects or their secretions. In Lycaenid butterflies, aphytophagy has evolved independently several times, mostly as scattered single species within phytophagous clades. One exception is the Afrotropical genus Lepidochrysops, where all described species are assumed to be predaceous on ant brood or fed by trophallaxis. Little is known about their life history or the relationships among species. Dr Espeland traveled to Africa to gather information and answer questions about the evolution of predation and diversification of the group. She described her fieldwork in Zambia, Malawi, S. Africa and other locales. With the help of local organizations and individuals, she collected most of her target species in spite of difficult circumstances, including fires set by poachers and illegal logging.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:45 for discussion and refreshments.

Respectfully submitted,
Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary