Ready for the Virtual Moth Open House at the Bohart Museum of Entomology?

Entomologist Jeff Smith pins a specimen for the Bohart Museum of Entomology collection that he curates. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

There will be no hot chocolate.

 

There will be no cookies.

 

But not to worry--there will be moths! And lots of them!

 

It's traditional for the Bohart Museum of Entomology at UC Davis to serve hot chocolate and cookies at its annual Moth Open House.  But no thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, nothing much is traditional any more.

 

So this year, in observance of National Moth Week, the Bohart Museum has scheduled a Virtual Moth Open House from 1 to 2 p.m. (Pacific Time) on Saturday, July 25. 

The Bohart Museum will live-stream the free open house on Facebook.  Entomologist Jeff Smith, who curates the 500,000 Lepidoptera  (butterflies and moths) collection, will show specimens and answer questions. 

"We started holding a moth-themed open house near Mother's Day in May, because people who are enthusiasts for moths are called moth-ers,” said Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator for the Bohart Museum. “We then switched our programming to align with National Moth Week. This year's Moth Week is July 18-26. The annual event is celebrated throughout the world with private and public events.  

Bohart Museum officials are preparing videos on black-lighting and how to spread and pin moths. 

During the Facebook Live program, viewers can type in their questions on moths. 

Smith is expected to answer questions such as:

• What is the largest moth?
• How do butterflies and moths differ?
• What is so unique about moths?
• Why should we be concerned with moth diversity?

Smith received a 2015 Friend of the College Award from the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences for saving the museum some $160,000 over a 27-year period through his volunteer service.  

LynnKimsey, director oftheBohart Museum and UC Davis professor of entomology, nominated Smith for the award. “You could not ask for a better friend than Jeff Smith,” she said, noting that he has “brought us international acclaim and saved us $160,000 through donations of specimens and materials, identification skills and his professional woodworking skills. This does not include the thousands of hours he has donated in outreach programs that draw attention to the museum, the college and the university.” 

Kimsey, who has directed the museum since 1989, remembers when Smith joined the museum. “When Jeff was working for Univar Environmental Services, a 35-year career until his retirement in 2013, he would spend some of his vacation days at the museum. Over the years Jeff took over more and more of the curation of the butterfly and moth collection. He took home literally thousands of field pinned specimens and spread their wings at home, bringing them back to the museum perfectly mounted. To date he has spread the wings on more than 200,000 butterflies and moths. This translates into something like 33,000 hours of work!”  The numbers have since increased.

“About a decade ago, Jeff began helping us by assembling specimen drawers from kits that we purchased,” Kimsey related. “This substantially lowered our curatorial costs, from $50/drawer to $16/drawer. We use several hundred drawers a year to accommodate donated specimens, research vouchers and specimens resulting from research grants and inventories. More recently, he's been accumulating scrap lumber and making the drawers from scratch at no cost to us. Overall, he has made more than 2000 drawers. Additionally, he makes smaller specimen boxes with the leftover scrap wood, which are used by students taking various field courses in the department. We simply could not curate the collection without his contributions.”  

Kimsey praised Smith for completely reorganizing the butterfly and moth collection. “It's no small feat to rearrange this many specimens, housed in roughly one thousand drawers,” she said. “Many thousands of the specimens needed to be identified, and the taxonomy required extensive updating and reorganization.”

The Bohart Museum, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus, houses a global collection of nearly eight million specimens. It is also the home of the seventh largest insect collection in North America, and the California Insect Survey, a storehouse of the insect biodiversity. Noted entomologist Richard M. Bohart (1913-2007) founded the museum.

The Bohart Museum is the home of a “live” petting zoo featuring Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and tarantulas, and a gift shop stocked with T-shirts, sweatshirts, books, jewelry, posters, insect-collecting equipment and insect-themed candy. 

Link:
Spreading Wings: The Amazing Work of Bohart Museum Associate Jeff Smith