Meeting 1225 Minutes
The 1225th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club was called to order by President Jessie Thuma at 7:33pm on Tuesday April 11, 2023. Approx. 18 members and guests attended with 8 more joining us on Zoom.
New business:
The election for 2023-2024 Club officers takes place this evening.
Jacob Dayton, Brendan Carson, Alyssa Murray and Seung-huan Kim were nominated for membership.
Old business:
Anshuman Swain was approved for membership.
The Club is seeking a member to bring refreshments for meetings. They will be reimbursed for related expenses.
Our speaker was Dr. Lynn Adler of UMass Amherst. Her talk was entitled “Disease where you dine: The role of floral traits in pollinator-pathogen interactions”
Food resources can alter host-pathogen dynamics not only via nutrition, but sometimes via chemical or mechanical traits that reduce infection. Many pollinator species are declining due to a range of factors including parasites and pathogens, but the potential for certain plant species to affect pollinator-pathogen interactions is largely unrecognized. Professor Adler’s previous work discovered that consuming sunflower pollen (Helianthus annuus) dramatically and consistently reduced infection by the gut pathogen Crithidia bombi in the common eastern bumble bee, Bombus impatiens. Her lab has now expanded this work to consider the breadth of this effect, both in the range of plant species whose pollen reduces Crithidia, and the range of bee castes and species responsive to it, plus the mechanisms underlying this effect and the field consequences for pollinator health. Her work demonstrates the role that a key floral resource can play in pollinator-pathogen dynamics. Planned future research goals include ways to link understanding of this system from molecular scales up to implications on the landscape level.
The meeting was adjourned at 8:50
Respectfully submitted, Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary
