NEWSLETTER
03/27/98 Entomology and Nematology News - Vol. 3, No. 6
A University of Florida Publication

CONGRATULATIONS!

Dr. Marjorie Hoy has been selected as one of this year's recipients of the National Award for Agricultural Excellence (NAAE). This award is given each year by the National Agri-Marketing Association (NAMA) to individual in agribusiness, public service, science, technology or the private sector who have made agriculture a better industry because of their lifetime contributions and achievements. The award will be presented at NAMA's annual conference on April 17th. in Dallas, Texas.

Congratulations to my friend and former editorYasmin Cardoza who successfully defended her thesis on Thursday March 26!. The title of her thesis is "Resistance to Squash Silverleaf Disorder and Oviposition Site Selection by Bemisia argentifolii on Cucurbita pepo L."

Jennifer Anderson, a Master's student with Dr. Jim Maruniak has been quite busy lately. She recently was awarded the 1998 R. Eldred Carpenter Jr. Memorial Scholarship for further agricultural related studies at the University of Florida as well as the 1998 Mulrennan Award for academic achievement and service to IFAS. In addition Jennifer has also been included as one of the 1998 Who's Who Among American Colleges and Universities at the University of Florida. Congratulations!

Dina Richman (a doctoral student with Dr. Philip Koehler) was announced Wenesday night as one of three newly elected graduate students senators. Dina will represent all UF graduate students as a member of the UF legislative branch. This election marks the first time graduate students were able to vote for graduate student senators. In the past, only undergraduate senators were elected to represent each department.

News from the entomologists at Homestead:

Divina Amalin and Wendy Meyer won the William Kendall Scholarship for students conducting research in tropical fruit crops in Dade County. Rita Duncan was the recipient for the University of Florida, Superior Achievements Award. Dr. J. E. Peña has been invited as the US speaker at the International Citrus Leafminer Symposium to be held in Valencia, Spain , March 29-31, 1998.

PUBLICATIONS

Alvarez, J.M., and R. Van Driesche. 1998. Biology of Cybocephalus sp. nr.nipponicus (Coleoptera: Cybocephalidae) a natural enemy of euonymus scale, Unaspis euonymi (Homoptera: Diaspididae). Environ. Entomol. 26: 130-136.

Chen, Z. X., and D. W. Dickson, 1997. Minimal growth temperature of Pasteuria penetrans. Supplement to the Journal of Nematology. 29:635-639.

A commentary, "Laboratory Containment of Transgenic Arthropods", was published by Marjorie Hoy, Richard Gaskalla, John Capinera and Carolyn Keierleber in the winter 1997 issue of American Entomologist.

Capinera, J.L. (February 1998). Sweetpotato weevil, Cylas formicarius (Fabricius). UF/IFAS Featured Creatures. EENY-27. http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/creatures/veg/potato/sweetpotato_weevil.htm

Knox. M.A. (February 1998). Harlequin bug, Murgantia histronica (Hahn). UF/IFAS Featured Creatures. EENY-25. http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/creatures/veg/leaf/harlequin_bug.htm

Knox, M.A. (February 1998). Indian meal moth, Plodia interpunctella (Hubner). UF/IFAS Featured Creatures. EENY-26. http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/creatures/urban/stored/indianmeal_moth.htm

UPCOMING EVENTS

Enrique Perez is leaving for California on Tuesday, March 31. He has accepted a postdoctoral position with Dow AgroSciences. Everyone is invited to celebrate with Enrique Friday at noon in room 2314. Bring a covered dish to share and join in wishing Enrique the best of luck.

Kanapaha is just around the corner March 28-29. Volunteers are still needed to help set up and take down the tent.

Next week is Graduate Student Appreciation Week! In addition to numerous activities held on campus our department will be sponsoring an appreciation breakfast on April 1 at 9:30 am in room 1031. Our advisors will be given the opportunity to shower us with accolades and thank us for enriching their lives. Also at the breakfast, awards for ENSO participation will be given out and the new officers will be announced.

One of the events taking place next week will be the Graduate Student Forum (GSF) which has been organized by Dina Richman, a doctoral student under Dr. Koehler. This day long forum provides an opportunity for graduates students to present their research and creative endeavors to the university community. It begins at 8:00 am on April 3 in the Reitz Union and everyone is invited to attend.

The EPA will hold a Pesticide Environmental Stewardship Program (PESP) Regional Workshop in Gainesville on May 6-7, 1998. The workshop will immediately follow the first two days of the SE Pest Management Conference (May 3-6). The PESP workshop will cover both urban, landscape and agricultural areas. The PESP workshop is free, but advance registration is required.

OUT AND ABOUT

Tom Fasulo attended the Department of Defense (DoD) Pest Management Board meeting at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station on March 24th, and gave a talk on the software he develops in cooperation with other members of the department and industry. He also gave a four-hour computer presentation in the afternoon. Bill Kern, one of UF's Urban Wildlife Specialists and an alumnus of this department, was also there to present a talk and had three tables full of stuffed rodents, traps and exclusion devices. Phil Koehler attended the meeting on the previous day and spoke about Florida's IPM initiatives. The meeting was attended by DoD urban and medical entomologists from around the world.

SEB-ESA Dini Miller would like to thank all the students that contributed slides to the ESA Southeastern Branch photo salon this year. Last year only seven slides were submitted to the regional meeting. This year there were 52 entries, 24 of which were from our department. Congratulations to the following winners:

First Place- Doug Burkett, University of Florida for "Orb Weaving Spider"

Second Place- Todd Campbell, University of Tennessee for "Predaceous Diving Beetle Larva Eating a Tadpole"

Third Place- Hussein Sanchez-Arroyo, University of Florida for "Sphingid Suspended in Mid-air" Each of the winners will receive a plaque from the ESA Southeastern Branch for their achievement.

Chris Tipping presented a paper at the Southeastern Branch meeting entitled: Developmental rates of the tobacco thrips, Frankliniella fusca, on three host plants. Additionally, Chris participated in the Linnean games along with teammates Yasmin Cardoza, Andy Rasmussen, and Dini Miller. While our team did not win they all had a good time competing, and would now like to extend an invitation to all students interested in joining the team to contact Dr. Heather McAuslane or one of the team members for more information.

NATL NEWS

On March 12, Prof. Alan Long, School of Forest Resources & Conservation, supervised a successful burn of the upland pine in the high-use area of the Natural Area Teaching Laboratory (NATL). Helping him with rakes and drip torches were the burn crew from Austin Cary Forest and several volunteers, including Don Dickson, John Zenger, Jason Squitier, Gil Marshall, and Tom Walker. Shortly after the burn was completed all smoldering wood was extinguished. As a result, smoke from the burn caused no problems in the adjacent Performing Arts, Powell Hall, and Doyle Conner buildings.

Blame it on El Nino!

The contract documents for recontouring the NATL retention pond to produce a diversified wetland were completed in early January. However, Physical Plant Division (PPD) has delayed putting the project out to bid because the pond's high water level may result in abnormally high bids. In order to take advantage of possibly drier weather before summer rains start, PPD will soon ask for bids, and we'll find out if the high water has made the cost of the project exceed the available funds. High water also disrupted a trash pickup scheduled to remove the debris along NATL's south fence. It will be rescheduled later this spring, when the water recedes.

COMPUTER BYTES

Thanks to funds from private industry, Florida Entomological Society, Department of Entomology and Nematology, and IFAS Dean for Research, all back issues of Florida Entomologist should soon be freely accessible on the Internet's WWW. Furthermore, articles will be full-text searchable by any word or phrase or combination. PDF files of the articles will allow making e-reprints of any article. The target date for scanning, OCRing, indexing, and posting the nearly 20,000 pages of back issues, from 1917 to 1994, is June 1998. Florida Center for Library Automation will post the issues as part of their digital library. The user interface will be the same as for the 600 or so Elsevier journals they are posting (but access for Fla Entomol will be unrestricted). This project will make it possible for any article in any issue of Florida Entomologist to be viewed with a click on a references-cited entry in any re-publication. What ‘Florida Entomologist' authors will have is a prototype of what all authors of primary scientific articles want and will soon be able to afford. Incidentally the total cost of FES making Florida Entomologist back issues available is 60 cents a page (=$12,000). The company doing the scanning and indexing is the same one that does it for JSTOR. If you have accessed JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/) and searched the ecology journals they have on line (now including Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics), you know how remarkable the search capabilities of this system are.

A TITANTIC PROJECT

Three years in the making... A cast of millions... Don Short's, Russ Mizell's and Tom Fasulo's sweeping saga of the sex, destruction and murder hidden behind the foliage of Florida's woody ornamental industry. Coming soon to a CD drive near you. Woodybug (UF/IFAS Publication SW-119) is a CD knowledgebase of pest and beneficial arthropods of Florida woody ornamentals. It includes information on the biology, life cycle, damage, sampling and biological control of the bad guys, including over 80 full-color photographs. Detailed information on beneficial species, along with 60 full-color photographs, and detailed IPM techniques are included. Thousands of links to definitions of scientific terms make this CD extremely easy to understand for non-entomologists. Cost is $20 and it can be ordered through UF/IFAS Publications at 800-226-1764 (or 352-392-1764 for information only). More information is available on the UF/IFAS Buggy Software WWW site at:

http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/fasulo/pests/software/

Additionally, copies of Woodybug will soon be available on the computers in the EntNem computer lab.

Dr. Paul Choate is assembling a list of commonly cited journals with their full titles and BIOSIS abbreviations for posting on our publications web page. He has combined his list with lists from several other researchers. The number of journal names is now over 500. If anyone has a similar list that they would like to have included, to share with others, please give him a copy, preferably as a computer file. Dr. Choate will post his list soon, but will add other journals as people make contributions.

Dr. Jon Allen invites everyone to drop by his newest website: Insect Population Modeling Laboratory. The site introduces the personnel and activities of his laboratory and includes several links to ecology and entomology related sites.

ENSO NEWS

Butterfly Gardening Akers Pence, a doctoral student with Dr. Emmel is coordinating the annual refurbishment of the Scott Yocom Memorial Garden. The following is a letter from Akers detailing the development and current status of the restoration plans:

At the first meeting of 3 butterfly gardeners we wrote a wish list of things we'd like to plant. Unfortunately our courtyard is plagued with root-knot nematodes. Fortunately when we took samples of infected plants from three corners of the plot to Tom Hewlett he found that he had the bacterium that will "attach"to the roots and he has agreed to treat a limited number of plants. At a meeting with Diana Simon, staff continuity liaison, and Margo Duncan who designed the original garden for Dr. Scott Yocom we got a copy of the plan and the list of things to be replanted according to tradition. Michael Patnaude, Denise Bonilla, Yasmin Cardoza, and Akers Pence did the spring pruning and the initial weeding. Dr. Robert Dunn looked over our wish list to help us find nematode resistant perennials and annuals. Claudia Riegel started the approved plants in the greenhouse; some from purchased seed and some from seed collected last fall. In a month or so these plants should be ready to set out. If you want to help Claudia transplant them to flats volunteer soon! So far she's started two Monarda species, the native red salvia, Mexican sunflower, and Echinacea purpurea. ENSO plans to buy a native buttonbush, some lantanas, and pentas. Yasmin will donate some Mexican heather, Akers has some passion vine, and Claudia Larsen of the botany department has started some native coreopsis for us. She has also agreed to advise us about a proper watering regimen. Janete Brito and Fahiem El-borai planted the marigolds and Claudia Riegel set out the parsley. Parsley? Yep, it's a larval host for the beautiful bBlack swallowtail! Want to learn more? Your next chance to volunteer is (tentatively) Thursday afternoon, April 2 before and after seminar, SEE YOU THERE!

Travel Grant Deadline The ENSO grant deadline for the Society of Nematologists meeting (June 20-24 in St. Louis) is Tuesday March 31.

The Shirts Off Our Backs

The Entomology t-shirt design is completed and the shirts are being printed. A draft of Elk Fulton's design is included on the final page of the newsletter. The t-shirts will display a colored version of this design and should be completed in time for Kanapaha (so we will be able to take orders). The proceeds will be used fund ENSO activities.

Urban Pest Collections

Thanks largely to efforts of Jerry Gahlhoff and Dini Miller, ENSO has sold two more cockroach collections! Even as they completed these two, orders for at least seven more collections have flowed in. These seven collections will generate $3500 for ENSO, so if everyone pitches in we can easily complete them by the end of the summer.


The next newsletter will be published Thursday, April 23. Deadline for contributions is Monday, April 20.

This version of the newsletter is edited and published for the Web by Tim McCoy.

Hardcopy Editor: Tim McCoy


March 1998. Updated March 2003.