Meeting 1231 Minutes

The 1231st meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club was called to order by President Jacob Dayton at 7:50pm on Tuesday, February 20, 2024. 20 members and guests attended with 16 additional attendees on Zoom.

New business:
Scott Smyers discussed new details for the club’s 150^th anniversary.
Dates will be July 12-14 and August 15-17^th.
The Harvard Museum of Natural History is planning an outreach program on insects in March 28. Talk to Jacob if you’d like to participate.

Old business:
Six nominees were approved­­ for membership: Michael La Scaleia, Billy Hickey, Elio Challita,
Jorge Romero, and Yuttapong Thawornwattana.

Our speaker was Heather S Bruce of the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. Her talk was entitled “Arthropod legs: novelty and homology over half a billion years”.
Arthropods are the most successful group of animals on the planet, in part due to structures like insect wings, beetle horns, and crustacean carapaces. Are these novel structures? Short answer: No.
Dr. Bruce explored this question with work on the amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis. She discussed possibilities: wings may have evolved from body wall plates or leg lobes, or evolved through gene co-option. Through her work w/ Parhayle embryos and subsequent analysis of best-studied leg genes and analysis of leg segment alignments she determined that wings evolved from an ancestral exite that originated from crustaceans eighth leg segment. In related work w/ Daphnia, she found that the crustacean carapace is also derived from a leg exite homologous to insect wings or other structures. Further investigation found most insects have abdominal legs as embryos, leading to the eventual conclusion that developmental fields can persist in cryptic form and be re-activated and elaborated in later lineages in the form of, as Dr. Bruce put it, “sticky-outty things”.

The meeting was adjourned at 9:17.