Meeting 1239 Minutes

Minutes from the 1239th Meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club

The 1239th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club was called to order by President Sarah Dendy at 7:34pm on Tuesday, February 11, 2025. 18 members and guests attended with 12 additional attendees on Zoom.

New business:

Dues are due

We have two nominees for membership, Jansen Hu and Lexie O’Brian

Old business: Dues are due

Our speaker was Dr. Liz Clifton, a behavioral ecologist at UNH. Her talk was entitled “Can termites inform us on general group conflict?”

Liz began with an appreciation of termites for their role as recyclers of plant material and decomposers of cellulose. She introduced her talk with Lanchester’s “Mathematics in Warfare”, which attempts to predict the winner of a conflict by examining the size and fighting ability of the opposing groups. She created petri dish battles between termite groups of various sizes and individual fighting abilities and described the results.

Part two of her talk was an assessment of the evolution of defenses in several termite genera, including passive defense as in the architecture of their nests, and active defenses, as in the various forms of termite soldiers mandibles. She looked at types of battles, soldiers vs. soldiers, workers vs. workers, and soldiers vs. workers. Two similar defenses, autothysis and dehiscence, involve the rupture of the termite’s body. Liz concluded with a phylogenetic analysis of termite defenses which revealed a correlation between termites that rely on self-rupturing and a loss of soldiers.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:48

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Respectfully submitted,

Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary