Meeting 1207 Minutes

Minutes from the 1207th Meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club

President Sang il Kim called the 1207th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club to order at 7:35pm on Tuesday December  8. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting was held on Zoom. Approx. 31 members and guests were in attendance.

New business: Three nominations for membership:
Jessica Garb, Christina Kwapich, James C. Trager

Old business Kyle DeMarr was approved for membership.

Our speaker was Dr. Hojun Song of the  Department of Entomology, Texas A&M University.

His talk was entitled “From cricket songs to swarming locusts: Elucidating patterns and processes of orthopteran evolution”.

Over the past 350+ million years, Orthopterans have diversified into numerous lineages (more than 28,000 species) including grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids. Dr. Song’s research program uses Orthoptera as a model system to understand behavioral, ecological, physiological, morphological and molecular evolution in a phylogenetic framework. He presented two examples. In the first, he discusses the evolution of hearing and sound production in various orthopterans. Second, he examines the genus Schistocerca, to investigate the evolution of density-dependent phenotypic plasticity. Only one sp. Schistocerca gregaria, is found in Africa, but ~45 are found in Central and South America. The new world sp. show a spectrum of behaviors, from solitary to potentially gregarious. By rearing them in isolation and high density conditions, and Dr. Song was able to identify patterns of behavior, corroborated by field data, that add new insight to questions of phenotypic plasticity.

The meeting was adjourned at 9:05pm.

Respectfully submitted, Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary