Meeting 1224 Minutes

Minutes from the 1224th Meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club

The 1224th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club was called to order by President Jessie Thuma at 7:33pm on Tuesday March 14, 2023. Due to inclement weather, the meeting was held on Zoom. Approx. 20 members and guests attended.

New business: Anshuman Swain, the evening’s speaker, was nominated for membership.

Old business:

Isaac Weinberg, Kevin Headrick and Robert Hart were approved for membership

Nominations for 2023-2024 Club officers are now being accepted.

The Club is seeking a member to bring refreshments for meetings. They will be reimbursed for related expenses.

Our speaker was Anshuman Swain, Junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. His talk was entitled “Scars and Traces: Understanding animal behaviors and interactions in the fossil record.”

Anshuman introduced his topic with an overview of signs of animal behavior in the fossil record. Cambrian fossils show branching burrows in marine substrates made by early organisms and distinctive trails left by trilobites that suggest migration or mating aggregations.

Later in the fossil record, plant/insect interactions dominate fossilized evidence of behaviors.

Chewed leaves, leaf mines, rolled leaf edges, galls and domatia help reconstruct plant and insect populations and environmental conditions at the time the fossils were formed. Another type of fossil evidence concerns bite marks left by the jaws of fatally fungus-afflicted ants. Currently, Anshuman isq working with another researcher at a local fossil site.

Anshuman presented a case for using plant-damage type associations as a good functional proxy for exploring plant-insect interactions in both deep time and across biogeographical regions. This could pave the way for standard usage and comparisons in both paleo- and neo-ecology.

The meeting was adjourned at approximately 8:38.

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Respectfully submitted, Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary