Meeting 1233 Minutes
The 1233rd meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club was called to order by President Jacob Dayton at 7:46pm on Tuesday, April 9, 2024. 14(?) members and guests attended with 3 additional attendees on Zoom.
New business: Qian Tang was nominated for membership.
Election for next years’ CEC officers to be held at the May meeting.
Plans for the 150th anniversary at Mt. Washington have been announced.
Old business: Lucy Wilson was approved for membership.
Our speaker was Dr. Mattheau Comerford of UMass/Boston. His talk was entitled
Why nothing in ecology or evolution makes sense, except in the light of the other:
Testing Eco-Evo Dynamics Through the Beak of the Red-Shouldered Soapberry Bug
Eco-evolutionary dynamics refer to the cyclic interaction between evolution and ecology, where an organism’s ecological interactions can influence the evolution of a trait, and conversely, evolutionary changes can impact ecological interactions. Due to the often contrasting time scales at which ecology and evolution operate, the rapid life history of insects offers a unique opportunity to study these crucial feedback loops. In this context, Dr. Comerford has utilized the red-shouldered soapberry bug (Jadera haematoloma) to investigate eco-evolutionary theory from both perspectives. He began with a less-studied phenomena known as spatial sorting. Hurricane Harvey provided an opportunity to study spatial sorting in soapberry bugs. The bugs are dietary specialist seed predators with short and long winged individuals. Long-winged individuals successfully relocated to new areas while short winged individuals did not. One gene influencing two or more seemingly unrelated phenotypic traits is termed pleiotropy, and in the case of the soapberry bug, wing length is correlated to beak length. The bugs’ preferred host plants were not necessarily available at their new locations, leading to a mismatch between the longer beaks and the available fruits. Dr. Comerford concluded with a discussion the first known example of a hemipteran insect acting as both a plant-pollinator and a seed-predator and its relative costs and benefits.
The meeting was adjourned at 8:54
