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CORPUS CHRISTI – The Department of Entomology and the Texas AgriLife Extension Service recently named Robert Bowling to the position of Assistant Professor and Extension Specialist in Corpus Christi.

Bowling will start his position on July 1 and will replace the position that was recently held by Dr. Roy Parker until he retired on August 31, 2013.

Bowling first joined the Department and Extension in 2000 as an Extension Agent – Integrated Pest Management in Dumas, Texas. While he was in Dumas, he has cooperated with area consultants, producers and other agricultural professionals to help mitigate pest outbreaks, organized research and demonstration programs and identify insects.

Bowling also was a field agronomist for Pioneer Hi-Bred International from 2005 until 2014. As field agronomist, he served a four-state region that included the Texas High Plains, New Mexico, southeast Colorado and the Oklahoma Panhandle.

During the time he was at Pioneer, Bowling was responsible for diagnosing field production issues in corn and sorghum and providing outreach programs for various audiences that cover advances in corn technologies and training the company’s sales force on topics, such as agronomic characteristics of corn and sorghum hybrids, proper placement of corn hybrids, and diagnosing field production issues. He also provided computer support to sales reps and account managers and assisted account managers with building educational presentations and articles relating to potential agronomic issues for crop advisors.

Bowling has received numerous awards, including the Pioneer Leader of Distinction and Circle of Excellence Awards, the Texas Pest Management Association’s Excellence in IPM Programming Award in 2004, and First place in Texas State Extension for Research and Result Demonstration Handbook in 2001.

Bowling received his Bachelor of Science in Plant Science from West Texas State University and his Masters of Science and Ph.D. degrees in entomology from Kansas State University.

“Dr. Bowling has a very strong work ethic and excellent abilities to communicate and work with people,” said Dr. Charles Allen, statewide IPM Coordinator and Associate Department Head for Extension Entomology Progams. “We are proud and very fortunate to be able to bring on Dr. Bowling to work with producers and others with insect related problems in the Coastal Bend region.”

HOUSTON –Two members of the Department of Entomology’s Knowledge Engineering Laboratory received an award during a recent event held for developers.

The five member team came up with a solution to help the city of Houston with improving an information system dealing with blighted properties during the annual City of Houston Open Invitational Hackathon in early June.

The team consisted of KEL members Reza Teshnizi  and Elvis Takow, as well as Biological and Agricultural Engineering grad student Rahuveer Modala City of Stafford staff member and former TAMU student Jonathan Farmer, and Frank Bracco, employee of the City of Houston. Their application “City of Houston Blighted Properties” was one of several winning entries that were selected during the competition.

The team’s goal for the project was to help the city to find a better way to deliver information to Houstonians about properties that may be deemed as blighted by the city. The prototype project features a special website featuring geographic information systems to help pinpoint the location, type of property, and which violations the property is being flagged for.

“The application allows citizens to gather information about Houston’s blighted properties, which are commercial or residential premises, which have been declared vacant, uninhabitable and hazardous,” he said. “The application also allows citizens and council members a more proactive way to see what’s going in their neighborhood.”

Takow said that the website is still in the prototype stage and still needs to have further testing and changes, as well as be reviewed by the city before it goes live.

Takow is a Ph.D. candidate from the Ecosystem Science and Management department and Teshnizi is a Master’s student in Computer Science.

The Hackathon event helps to engage developers, to help solve the city’s information technology problems through applications and help build the city’s overall technology infrastructure and expand its base into information technology to solve complex problems.

The event was sponsored by the Boniuk Foundation and was part of the National Day of Civic Hacking, which is an event to raise awareness of civic innovation.

BRYAN, Texas – More than 300 honey bee keepers and bee enthusiasts statewide descended upon the John G. and Janice Thomas Honey Bee Facility on June 7 for the annual Texas Beekeepers Association’s Summer Clinic.

Held every summer, the clinic allows bee keepers, gardeners, and honey bee enthusiasts to come together to learn about the latest research and the latest techniques and tips from experts from the Dr. Juliana Rangel Lab, members of the Texas Apiary Inspection Service and other presenters.

Since this summer’s clinic was the first time that it had been held at the facility at Texas A&M University’s Riverside Campus, visitors got the chance to view the facility during several morning tours conducted by members of Dr. Juliana Rangel’s lab and speak to other beekeepers and Texas Beekeepers Association members at a tent set up outside.

After the morning tours, Dr. Vaughan Bryant from the Department of Anthropology gave the plenary presentation titled “Pollen in Honey” and spoke on his research to the crowd.

After lunch, there were several different activities that attendees could choose from during the afternoon, including updates from Rangel from the Honey Bee Lab and Mark Dykes spoke about the Texas Apiary Inspection Service and what it can do for the beekeeping industry. In addition, several of the lab members and other researchers spoke on topics such as pheromones, the effects of brood pheromones on foraging and drone reproductive health.

The highlights of the clinic included demonstrations by apiary technician E.T. Ash on honey extraction and a hands-on live hive demonstration by apiary inspector Bill Baxter on the proper way to inspect hives.

Other activities included presentation on how to plant the right plants to attract bees by Becky Bender and Michael Parkey, the do’s and don’ts of marketing honey by John Hicks, and Top Bar Hives by Dean Cook.

Rangel was impressed by the turnout and said that holding this event helps to raise awareness about the center and what it can do for beekeepers.

“This is a chance for beekeepers for all levels to see the facility for the first time and hear and see our research that is conducted by our lab,” she said. “This is also a great time for them to visit with us and the apiary inspection service.”

“This is wonderful and it’s nice to see the building,” said Texas Beekeepers Association president Blake Shook. “It’s really a nice and we are grateful for A&M for helping us out with our industry and helping us to address the problems and challenges we are facing today.”

Dykes was also thrilled about the turnout and said that clinics like this one are helpful for beekeepers to learn the latest trends in industry and honey bee research.

“Clinics like the one we’re holding today are very important to the beekeeping community,” he said. “They provide a good platform to distribute information to the beekeepers and provide a place of fellowship to the beekeepers of the state.”

Who would have thought that stick insects would be so helpful in studying the predictability of the adaptive process that occurs when an insect adapts to a new host plant?

It is a question of more than academic interest. Many agricultural insect pests are the consequence of just such a host switch.

A group of scientists including Dr. Spencer Johnston of Texas A&M Department of Entomology recently captured the May 16 cover of Science magazine with a paper on the genetic changes driving the divergence of populations into new species, asking if this process can be predicted or repeated in stick insects.

Johnston said that these insects have been of interest for a long time as a model of host-plant-associated adaptation. Timema cristinae has adapted to thrive on two different host plants Adenostoma fasciculatum and Ceanothus spinosus. Insects adapted to the different hosts show distinct observed genomic and morphological differences such that the insect is easily recognized as associated with one or the other host plant.

Led by Dr. Victor Soria Carrasco, Johnston and several co-authors looked at the genetic changes observed over one generation when populations of a species of stick insect (T. cristinae) were transplanted from their preferred host plants to alternative hosts.

The question the group wanted to answer is, “How predictable is the adaptive process?” The insect seemed an obvious choice for addressing this question. We could do a field experiment to ask, “What are the effects of switching hosts? Can we observe a repetition of genomic changes associated with adapting to the alternate host?”

“What we are really asking is, ‘Can the insect switch hosts and repeat the process of adaptation to the alternate host’?” Johnston said. “If so, which of the differences are adaptive and which are chance? What we expected to find was a subset of genes which act together in the adaptive response, and evolve in parallel with the changes seen in the original adaptation to the different host plants.”

“What we found in T. critinae (the species of insect being studied) was that parallel changes were more common than expected by chance,” he said. Not surprisingly, we also found a large number of changes that did not parallel those that occurred in the original host-associated insects.”

Johnston also said that natural selection is both predictable and opportunistic and that the observed changes were made in the context of the genetic variation and genome architecture available in the insects when the host plant switch occurred.

“What makes the paper exciting is that we were able to use next generation sequencing technology to produce a massive data set, and specifically identify the changes that confirm the reality of this very intuitive concept,” he said.

The article can be found at: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6185/738.full