Meeting 1213 Minutes

Minutes from the 1213th Meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club

President Katherine Angier called the 1213th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club to order at 7:39pm on Tuesday December 14th 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting was held on Zoom. Approx. 23 members and guests were in attendance.

New business: None

Old business: Members are reminded to pay their dues.

The Club tentatively plans to return to in-person meetings in February 2022.

Our speaker was Dr. John Heraty of the University of California, Riverside. His talk was entitled Chalcidoid Wasps and the Interface of Systematics and Biology

Dr. Heraty offered a combination of natural history, taxonomy and phylogeny in his discussion of Chalcidoid wasps, an enormous group with approximately 48 families and 500,000 species so far, some as tiny as an amoeba. They have beneficial impacts as parasitoids of pest insects and as the sole pollinators of figs. After an overview, Dr. Heraty offered a closer look at the ant-parasitoids, the Eucharitidae. Although very diverse, they have in common a planidial larval form. These wasps deposit their eggs away from the host, often on a flower or other source of nectar. After hatching, the larvae have a series of unusual behaviors that they use to get into the ant nest where they feed on the brood. Equally important, on completing development, eucharitid adults have unique behaviors and certain chemical mimicries to get themselves out of the nest. Dr. Heraty followed with a look at Poneromorph parasitoids followed by a comparison of ant phylogenies with Eucharitid phylogenies that show “significant co-phylogeny despite major incongruence”.

The meeting was adjourned at 9:00 pm.

Respectfully submitted, Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary