Meeting 1242 Minutes

Minutes from the 1242nd Meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club

The 1242nd meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club was called to order by President Sarah Dendy at 7:35pm on Tuesday, May 13, 2025. Approx.12 members and guests attended with 6 additional attendees on Zoom.

New business:
Shraddha Lall was nominated for membership
Sarah requested nominations for new Club officers for 2025-2026. Tentative slate is:
President: open
Vice President: open
Secretary: Andrea Golden
Treasurer: Jay Shetterly
Executive Committee: Scott Smyers
Jay Shetterly presented the annual treasurer’s report.

Old business:
Brian Chan showed photos from his recent trip to Vietnam
VP Michael LaScalia attended the meeting with his new baby

Our speaker was Thalles Pereira, postdoctoral fellow at the MCZ
His talk was entitled North to Alaska: from NextGen sequencing to Citizen Science aiming to understand the subarctic and Arctic biodiversity

Climate change and other stresses are accelerating species extinctions worldwide, and they are occurring at a faster rate in Arctic and subarctic regions, like Alaska. Dr. Pereira gave fascinating talk focused mostly on Phoridae and their diverse lifestyles and morphologies. He described his work using DNA barcoding (nanopore sequencing technology) to find 50 new species of Phoridae (Diptera).

He also shared how residents in Alaska helped him discover and describe a new species of dark-winged gnat (Diptera: Sciaridae), Sciara serpens aka “snakeworms” for their larval habit of migrating in long conveyor-belt like columns. There are numerous hypothesis as to the purpose of these mass migrations.

The meeting adjourned at 8:45

Respectfully submitted,
Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary