Meeting 1214 Minutes

President Katherine Angier called the 1214th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club to order at 7:38pm on Tuesday January 11th 2022. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting was held on Zoom. Approx. 34 members and guests were in attendance.

New business:

Plans for upcoming meetings are ongoing, possibly in-person/Zoom hybrid seminars with an optional dinner beforehand.

Old business: None

Our speaker was Dr. Michael Kaspari, Professor of Biology at the University of Oklahoma. His talk was entitled Grasshoppers, Ants, and Vials Full of Slugs: Notes from the Insect Apocalypse

Dr. Kaspari’s lab explores “Geographical Ecology”, how environmental templates of temperature, precipitation, and biochemistry predict gradients of abundance, diversity, and function of terrestrial invertebrates (especially ants). He emphasizes the need for continuous, long-term data.

His two-part talk featured work on ants and their thermal tolerances followed by a study of the causes of grasshopper declines in grasslands.

In his study of thermal tolerances in ants, Dr. Kaspari found that overall ants have not suffered the declines seen in some other insects, and in fact some species that can tolerate greater thermal variations are increasing. There were winners and losers depending on species and habitat.

The grasshopper study was conducted at Konza Prairie with Dr. Ellen Welti and others. Twenty years of data shows that plant biomass is increasing but some nutrients are decreasing. They also found long term increases in temperature but not precipitation. Nutrient dilution appears to be affecting the length of time grasshoppers need to reach maturity. Kaspari noted that 40% of Earth’s landmass is grassland, and that other studies are showing an impact on marine environments as well.

The meeting was adjourned at 9:23 pm.

Respectfully submitted, Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary