Meeting 1227 Minutes

Meeting 1227 Minutes

The 1227th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club was called to order by President Jacob Dayton at 7:39pm on Tuesday, October 10, 2023. Approx. 12 members and guests attended in person and on Zoom.

There was no old business.

New Business:

Jay Shetterly celebrated his 61st anniversary as a member of CEC.

Scott Smyers held the Wachusett BioBlitz on September 23, 2023, with great success. Despite the rain, the group saw many amphibians and aquatic insects.

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the club, Scott Smyers is planning a multi-day field outing to New Hampshire in summer 2024 . The outing will recreate the club’s 1874 trek to Mount Washington. By the end of next meeting, the CEC needs to create a committee responsible for planning 150th anniversary celebrations.

Our speaker was Dr. Christine Dodge, a post-doc with UC Riverside and the USDA. Christine’s talk was entitled “Trials, travels, and tribulations: The evolution of a biological control program”.

Biological control, the use of natural enemies to control a pest, can be an effective way of controlling pest populations and mitigating damage. However, a tremendous amount of work goes into ensuring that a biocontrol program will be successful, effective, and safe. As a loose average, it takes five to ten years to develop a biocontrol program, from the first detection of a pest of concern to the release and monitoring of its natural enemies. Christine discussed her work at the USDA APHIS PPQ S&T Pest Methods Laboratory on Cape Cod . She studies two invasive insects with very different biologies: a species complex of ambrosia beetles known as shot hole borers (Euwallacea fornicatus species complex), and the box tree moth (Cydalima perspectalis) a newly invasive but fast-spreading ornamental pest. Christine discussed the intricacies of each of these systems and detailed the progress that has been made in building each of these biocontrol programs.

The basic steps to biological control are to identify a new pest, learn its biology as well as that of its natural enemies, determine closely-related non-target species that can be used to test biological control methods, and release natural enemies after intensive host specificity testing and mass rearing in the lab. Sourced from Taiwan, Christine’s lab has identified three wasp parasitoids that are natural enemies of the shot hole borer; attempts to mass rear these candidate species at the Pest Methods Laboratory have had limited success. Lab work has seen more success with the box tree moth, for which they have successfully reared box tree moths and some non-target Massachuetts Pyralid/Crambids in the lab. She will begin rearing parasitoids for host specificity testing.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:45.