Meeting 1205 Minutes
Minutes from the 1205th Meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club
President Sang il Kim called the 1205th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club to order at 7:36pm on Tuesday October 13. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting was held on Zoom.
Approx. 45 members and guests were in attendance.
Old business:
Treasurer Sofia Prado-Irwin gave the annual report on the club’s finances.
New business:
President Sang reminded members to pay their dues.
Our speaker was Nathan Lord, Asst. Professor at Louisiana State University.
His talk was entitled Iridescent Jewels: Integrative approaches to the studies of color in the beetle family Buprestidae.
Buprestids include about 15,000 species, range in size from about 1.6 to 77mm, are widely diverse in morphology and food range. To date, their phylogeny has been poorly studied.
Prof. Lord’s lab investigates color and vision in buprestids: structural and pigmentary color in the beetles themselves, and their perception and responses to color and pattern. He described the various types of color data they collect: reflectance and absorbance spectra, digital images and video, and SEM/TEM images examining the physical characteristics and strata of the beetles’ cuticle and how it modulates the iridescence characteristic of buprestids. One potential benefit of the Lord lab’s work is insight into the biology of the notorious Emerald Ash borer, responsible for widespread destruction of ash trees. Prof. Lord wrapped up with an introduction to the Insect Color Database, ICDB, a web portal for color data storage and analysis.
The meeting was adjourned at 9:09pm.
Respectfully submitted, Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary
