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An insect-adorned bandana to support ESC students!

(French follows)

This year, instead of the annual silent auction, the Student and Early Professional Affairs Committee of the Entomological Society of Canada is selling bandanas to raise money for the Annual Scholarship Fund.

This 100% cotton bandana, available in red or charcoal gray, is printed with the logo insects* of the ESC and all of the regional entomological societies, plus a bonus arctic wolf spider to represent the northern territories. The beautiful artwork is by Mary Capaldi, and you can find more of their work, much of it entomology-themed, here: https://linktr.ee/marycapaldi.

You can pre-order bandanas on Etsy or by contacting Catherine Scott by email or on twitter. We anticipate that the bandanas will be available for shipping around the time of the 2021 online annual meeting, in plenty of time for holiday gift-giving.

*list of featured taxa:

ESC – Grylloblatta campodeiformis
ESBC – Boreus elegans
ESAb – Apamea devastator
ESS – Melanoplus bivittatus
ESM – Cicindela formosa generosa
ESO – Danaus plexippus
SEQ – Limenitis arthemis arthemis
AES – Rhagoletis pomonella
Arctic wolf spider – Pardosa glacialis

Mockups of two bandanas featuring line drawings of insects and spiders. One is charcoal grey with white insects and the other is bright red with white insects.

Un bandana orné d’insectes pour soutenir les étudiants de la SEC

Cette année, au lieu des enchères silencieuses annuelles, le Comité des affaires étudiantes et des jeunes professionnels de la Société d’entomologie du Canada vend des bandanas pour amasser des fonds pour le Fonds des bourses de la SEC.

Ces bandanas sont faits de coton à 100%, sont disponibles en rouge ou gris anthracite, et ont des imprimés montrant les insectes* des logos de la SEC et de toutes les sociétés entomologiques régionales, en plus d’une lycose glaciale pour représenter les territoires. Cette belle œuvre d’art est de Mary Capaldi, et vous pouvez trouver davantage de ses œuvres, en grande partie sur le thème de l’entomologie, ici : https://linktr.ee/marycapaldi.

Vous pouvez précommander des bandanas sur Etsy ou en contactant Catherine Scott par courriel ou sur Twitter. Nous prévoyons que les bandanas seront prêts pour l’expédition au moment de la réunion annuelle en ligne de 2021, donc bien à temps pour offrir des cadeaux de Noël.

*liste des taxons représentés :

SEC – Grylloblatta campodeiformis
ESBC – Boreus elegans
ESAb – Apamea devastator
ESS – Melanoplus bivittatus
ESM – Cicindela formosa generosa
ESO – Danaus plexippus
SEQ – Limenitis arthemis arthemis
AES – Rhagoletis pomonella
Lycose glaciale – Pardosa glacialis

 

Folded bandana showing design including symbols representing all provincial and national entomological societies

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The ESA-ESC-ESBC JAM is around the corner

By Staffan Lindgren

Many of us remember our first interaction with the Entomological Society of America (ESA) when we co-hosted a JAM in Montreal. Canadians were generally upset that the meeting was controlled completely by the ESA. Because of this, many ESC members have been skeptical of the upcoming meeting, thinking that it may be a repeat of that experience.

I have been one of a number of ESC and ESBC members who have participated in the organization of this meeting. I am writing this short blog because I want to assure you that the ESA staff has gone out of their way to be inclusive with both ESC and ESBC. They acknowledged from the start the mistakes that were made in 2000, and they have lived up to their promise of better relations this time. We have met on-site in person twice (June 2017 and June 2018) and this year we have had monthly conference calls to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks. ESA staff has obviously handled the administrative duties given their experience and resources, but they have been extremely receptive to our suggestions and requests, and I cannot speak highly enough of all of them. Rosina Romano, Becky Anthony and others have been amazing to work with (I think they are miracle workers), and we can look forward to a great meeting where all three societies will be equal parties.

In these times of political uncertainty and what seems like daily tragedies throughout the world, it is re-assuring to know that our profession of entomology serves as a shining example of how well we can get along when we treat each other with respect and in a spirit of cooperation.

I look forward to seeing you in Vancouver.

Vancouver Convention Centre. Image: https://www.vancouverconventioncentre.com/facility

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Job Opening – Entomology Curator, Royal British Columbia Museum

After an outpouring of support from the Canadian entomological community, the Royal British Columbia Museum has decided to hire a new Curator of Entomology!

The competition for the Curator of Entomology position at the Royal BC Museum is now posted at http://royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/assets/Posting3.pdf. Deadline for applications has been extended to 24 March.

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Exotic field collecting…in the hallway!

The following post is by Chloe Gerak, a Masters student at UBC who completed an undergraduate project at Simon Fraser University in the Gries lab.This past weekend, she won the top prize for an undergraduate talk at the Annual General  Meeting of the Entomological Society of British Columbia with a talk entitled “How the false widow finds true love”. Photos by Sean McCann.

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A male Steatoda grossa. These spiders have stereotyped courtship behaviour involving stridulation of an organ located dorsally between the cephalothorax and abdomen.

For approximately eight months, I studied the courtship behaviour and chemical communication between male and female false widow spiders, Steatoda grossa. Prior to studying them in Prof. Gerhard Gries’ lab at Simon Fraser University, I had never even heard of this species!

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Female Steatoda grossa on her web.

My mentor Catherine Scott and I had collected juvenile and mature false widow spiders around the basement of the biology wing at SFU… and let’s just say we didn’t have a lack of specimens to collect. Almost every baseboard we turned over or corner we searched, we would find these little guys and collect them individually into petri dishes. These formed the nucleus of our laboratory colony which we reared for behavioural experiments.

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A  common nickname for Steatoda grossa is the “cupboard spider,” which I find extremely appropriate considering these spiders seem to love dwelling in dark corners. Since they are so abundant around SFU, and I had never even seen one before this, I think people should not be frightened by cohabiting with them… likely, you won’t even know they are there!

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Digitizing the Journal of the Entomological Society of British Columbia

As the new web editor of the Entomological Society of British Columbia (ESBC), last fall I began a push toward the digitization of all past issues of the Journal of the ESBC and the implementation of an online journal management system. At the time, only a relatively few issues of JESBC were available online, with only the most recent issues available as PDFs. None of these were easily searchable, nor were these issues indexed on our site, Google Scholar, or other search engines.

Over the years, each editor handled submissions in a slightly different way, via email (or post!), and copies of digital files were not retained by the society, but rather by individual editors. Additionally, we used an annual submission deadline, which resulted in annual “publication push” that resulted in a single “crunch time” leading up to year’s end.

It was with these limitations in mind that I spearheaded an effort to simplify the submission, editorial, and publication processes, and to provide truly open access to our entire journal archive in an effort to increase our journal’s profile, readership, and citations.

Over the past several months (and still ongoing), in conjunction with the SFU library and the Public Knowledge Project, the ESBC began our transition to our new online journal management system and the scanning and uploading of all volumes of the JESBC. Our choice of journal management system was based on several important criteria: cost, features, ease-of-use, robustness, “future-proofing”, and support.

In the interest of brevity, I won’t go into all of the details here, but from our choices of journal management systems, the clear winner was Open Journal Systems, which provides a low-cost, feature-rich, customizable, easy to use, well established, and open-source journal publishing platform. Moving to this new system allows us to easily publish using a continuous submission model, so that articles appear online as they are accepted for publication, as well as provide a streamlined publication work-flow and centralized database.

Screenshot of the new JESBC web site

Our new journal site is now up and running! Check out http://journal.entsocbc.ca for complete open access to all articles, and stay tuned as more back issues of the society’s journal and quarterly bulletin archive are uploaded (going back to 1906!) and as we add DOI support and cross-referencing.

Our journal digitization effort is a huge project, and although we’ve made great headway, we could use your help (more on this soon)! We are looking for volunteers to assist with moving this content online to the new site. Contact Alex Chubaty (webmaster@entsocbc.ca)  if you are interested in contributing time towards this project.

Thank you!

Alex M. Chubaty

ESBC Web Editor

ESBC on Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/135038946598013/

ESBC on Twitter: @EntSocBC

http://entsocbc.ca

http://journal.entsocbc.ca

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