Meeting 1217 Minutes

Minutes from the 1217th Meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club

The 1217th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club was called to order at 7:38pm on Tuesday April 12th 2022. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting was held on Zoom. Approx. 24 members and guests were in attendance.

New business: Election for Club officers for 2022-2023 will be held at the May meeting.

Old business:

Our speaker was Sarah Kocher of Princeton University. Her talk was entitled “Harnessing natural variation to study the evolution of social behavior”

Dr. Kocher’s lab is interested in understanding how and why social behavior evolves. They study systems that have extensive variation in social behavior, and use complementary approaches from population and quantitative genetics through field ecology and mathematical modeling to understand how genes and ecology interact to shape social traits.

Halictid bees exhibit remarkable diversity in social behavior, both within and between species. The social structure of the halictid bee, Lasioglossum albipes, varies among populations: some are solitary, others are social. Bees found at higher latitudes are more likely to be solitary–social nests require a longer season. Behavioral polymorphism is likely to have a strong genetic component. The application of genomic tools can help elucidate the genetic basis of sociality and investigate how environmental cues act on these genes to produce the observed variation.

For more information, visit the Kocher lab website, kocherlab.com.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:43 pm.

Respectfully submitted, Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary