Air Potato Challenge Events, led by Dr. Carey Minteer and Ken Gioeli (UF-IFAS St. Lucie County Extension), in Leon Co. and Bay Co. (in cooperation with Julie McConnell, UF-IFAS Bay County Extension) were featured in The Panama City News Herald, The Florida Channel, and WTXL ABC 27 in Tallahassee. The event made the front page of the Tallahassee Democrat.

The Florida State Horticultural Society awarded Ken Gioeli (UF-IFAS St. Lucie County Extension) and Dr. Carey Minteer the 2018 Florida State Horticultural Society’s Natural Resources Section Best Paper Award for their paper “Air Potato Biological Control Extension Program: A Success Story”.

ABOVE: Many of our faculty were able to participate in the department’s research retreat at the Plant Science Unit in Citra, Florida. The retreat activities were coordinated by Dr. Bryony Bonning.

Dr. Ed Vargo from Texas A&M University visited the Chouvenc Lab on June 4-5, presented a seminar at the Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center on the genetics of invasive ant species, attended Joseph Velenovsky's PhD proposal, and went on a field trip to collect ants and termites present in south Florida.

Dr. Jennifer Gillett-Kaufman and Dr. Phil Kaufman are leading the UF in Florence: Global Perspectives Study Abroad program in Florence, Italy during Summer A. This summer, 117 UF students are participating in the program where they are immersed in Italian culture for six weeks. While overseeing the safety and needs of the students in the program, the Kaufman’s also teach an experiential learning course titled Feast or Famine in Florence (ALS4404) where students learn about the influence that insects have played in Italian history, art, science and food. Students visit and learn about many important sites in Florence, including burial sites related to the Black Death, a 500-year-old olive farm known for producing the highest quality oils, the Galileo Museum of Science, to study historical scientific instruments, La Specola, the oldest natural history museum in Europe, with an amazing insect collection, and travel to Chiantishire, a site in Tuscany famous for agricultural production to learn directly from producers about their pest issues.

ABOVE: The entomology team from the West Florida and Education Center met on June 7th to discuss topics including the identification of insects associated with field crops in the Florida Panhandle, the concepts associated with the herbicide tolerant plants and Bt technology in corn and cotton. They also discussed the protocols of the projects that will be performed during the 2018 summer. Meeting participants included: Dr. Paula-Moraes, Latisa Ledbetter-Kish (Dr. Paula-Moraes’s technician), Jessica Baldwin (master student in the Entomology & Nematology Department), Chris Hemphill (OPS of the entomology laboratory at WFREC), Supreet Kaur (summer internship student from Microbiology Department) and Scott Butts (OPS working with Dr. Paula-Moraes on the production of videos for the 2019 IPM3022 course).

We are proud to introduce our new summer, 2018 graduate students:

In Gainesville, we welcome James Weaver (MS, Dr. Mallinger) and Xiao Lai (Ph.D., Dr. Wong).

Joining us at the REC’s, we have Austin Fife (Ph.D., Dr. Martini, Quincy), and Victoria Adeleye (MS, Dr. Seal, Homestead).

And we are also pleased to introduce our non-campus MS students—Caitlin Gill, Kaydie McCormick, and Lincoln Wells.

We are looking forward to working with them!

Sage Thompson received a $1,000 scholarship from the Space Coast Gator Club. The Space Coast Gator Club has 7,500+ members who are all UF alumni that raise money to support Brevard County students at the University of Florida. In addition to supporting students through scholarships, the club also offers the use of their network to search for open jobs and internships for Gator grads.

ABOVE: On May 30th the DPMSO hosted an event at NATL focused on demonstration of insect pest traps used in surveys and monitoring. Speakers included Gabrielle LaTora from Dr. Liburd’s lab, Brad Danner from FDACS-DPI/CAPS, and Morgan Pinkerton and Sage Thompson from Dr. Hodges’ lab. We covered traps for stink bugs, spotted wing drosophila, the emerald ash borer, bark beetles, weevils and moths.

Ph.D./DPM student Cory Penca presented at the 2018 Peach Field Day held at the PSREU in Citra, Florida. The topic of his talk was practical pest management in Florida peaches.

Dr. Richard Baidoo, a Ph.D. (2015) alum of our department with Dr. Crow just started his new job as Discovery Nematologist with Corteva Agriscience (Dow-Dupont) in Indianapolis, IN.

ABOVE: Field season has begun in the Lucky lab. Pictured above, the team is collecting leaf litter samples to capture foraging ants. Undergraduates Lexie Nielsen (left) and James Pinkney (right), recent UF Entomology and Nematology graduate Katie Carroll (middle), and Master’s student, Rachel Atchison (not pictured) make multiple weekly trips to the Ordway-Swisher Biological Station to collect ant diversity data to discern how ant-mediated seed dispersal is affected by fire management in longleaf pine sandhill habitat.

Dr. Adam Wong is welcoming two graduate students to his team: Xiao Lai, a Ph.D. student with a Masters degree in Plant Pathology from North Dakota State University, started in the Summer; Matthew Pileggi, a Masters student recently graduated from UF has been an intern in the Wong lab since September 2017, he will be starting in the Fall.

Supreet Kaur is an undergraduate student from Microbiology and Cell Science; she is working at UF/WFREC under the supervision of Dr. Moraes. Supreet's work is part of a summer research program funded by the National Science Foundation and USDA grants that provide summer stipends for undergraduates to conduct faculty-guided research projects. Supreet has been involved in several experiments in the field and laboratory, working with Lepidoptera associated with cotton and peanut in the Florida Panhandle.

Ethan Doherty, MS graduate student in the Dale Lab, successfully defending his master's thesis titled, "The Effects of Turfgrass Cultivar Diversity and Composition on Herbivore Fitness and Behavior", on June 7th.

Matthew Borden, Ethan Doherty, Rebecca Perry, and Brianna Whitman (students in the Dale Lab) gave presentations about their independent research projects to landscape industry professionals at the Southeast Pest Management Conference on May 9th in Gainesville.

ABOVE: Last semester the Lucky Lab said goodbye and good luck to undergraduate Nate Duerr, who graduated in Spring 2018 with a major in Zoology and a minor in Entomology. You may have seen Nate’s Art-Science University Scholars Program project on display in the Entomology and Nematology Foyer—he constructed a fully rotatable and phylogenetically accurate mobile depicting the evolution of the ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Nate has just begun his Peace Corps assignment in Panama. Congratulations, Nate! We are looking forward to hearing about your work, and all of the great insects you encounter!

From the Outreach Coordinator

Here are our events from May:

• May 1st – Ocala Discovery Science Center –Laurel Lietzenmayer
• May 5th – Learning Gate Community School BioBlitz – James Brown, Laurel Lietzenmayer, Johanna Schwartz, and Jason Williams
• May 8th – Insect Day at Glen Springs Elementary – James Brown
• May 10th – Family Science Night at Williams Elementary - Laurel Lietzenmayer
• May 11th – Littlewood Elementary - Laurel Lietzenmayer
• May 16th – Newberry Elementary - Laurel Lietzenmayer
• May 17th – Newberry Community School - Laurel Lietzenmayer
• May 20th – Tree Kangaroo Awareness Day at the Santa Fe Zoo – Laurel Lietzenmayer and George Roman
• May 23rd – Idylwild STEAM Night - Laurel Lietzenmayer
• May 24th – Hidden Oak Science Symposium - Laurel Lietzenmayer
• May 30th – Metcalfe Career Day - Laurel Lietzenmayer

Upcoming Events:

• June 11th – Greenfield Preschool
• June 11th – Alachua County Extension
• June 12th – 4-H Bug Camp Tour
• June 14th – Forest Public Library
• June 18th – Summer Camp College Reach-Out Program
• June 19th – Finley Elementary
• June 30th – Brooker Creek Preserve
• July 24th – Fort White Elementary
• July 30th – Rad Kids Summer Camp
• July 31st – Fear Facers Summer Camp

ABOVE: Laurel Lietzenmayer and George Roman at the Santa Fe Teaching Zoo for Tree Kangaroo Awareness Day.

The live critters are always a hit with children and adults alike. The critters are available for you to check out should you be leading an outreach event. We have doubles of our most popular critters, as well as various native insect species depending on the time of year. We have large wood and Plexiglas cages for viewing our native orb weaving spiders. There is one travel cage and one larger static cage. Please be sure to contact us and review the protocol on transporting and handling the critters if you are not already familiar with it. If you lead an outreach, be sure to fill out a documentation form so your event can be included in the newsletter and we can log all outreach events.