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From left: Plant bugs named in honor of actor Harrison Ford, Vice President Kamala Harris, and entomologist Pete Oboyski are among 17 new species discovered in French Polynesia. Photo courtesy of Balukjian and Van Dam (2024)

Seventeen new species of plant bugs—a group of insects with a strawlike mouth used to feed on plant and animal matter—have been identified on the islands of French Polynesia, and their names honor scientists, actors, and Vice President Kamala Harris.

The insects were collected by Environmental Science, Policy, and Management alum Brad Balukjian, PhD ’13, who conducted field research on Mo’orea, Tahiti, and other nearby islands from 2007 to 2009, and again in 2011 as part of his PhD. The findings were published in late September in Insect Systematics and Diversity and challenged earlier taxonomic classifications that relied primarily on insect morphology.

“I knew that before I could answer any mechanistic scientific questions about the evolution of these bugs, I had to first understand what they were,” said Balukjian. “I became, without expecting it, a taxonomist and realized that the main focus of my research was going to be figuring out what these species are.”

Since completing his PhD, Balukjian has continued his research on plant bugs, published books on baseball and professional wrestling, and founded the Natural History and Sustainability program at Merritt College in Oakland. He is currently launching a new educational outreach project in French Polynesia called the Manumanu Project—operated in collaboration with the UC Berkeley Gump Station and the non-profit Te Pu Atitia—which will teach fifth-graders about insects to inspire the protection of biodiversity.

Rausser College spoke to Balukjian to learn more about his research, career, and plans for the Manumanu project.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

French Polynesia. Photo courtesy of Brad Balukjian.

What drew you to studying plant bugs in Mo’orea and Tahiti?

Islands and island ecosystems are kind of a throughline in what I've done, what I continue to do, and my passion. While I was an undergrad at Duke University, I created a self-designed major in island biogeography. I then worked at Islands magazine as an editor and was later drawn to the lab of Professor Rosemary Gillespie, who has written so many wonderful papers and articles about her work on island systems. She's also an arachnologist—I was never so keen on spiders, but I always liked insects.

I was specifically drawn to a group of insects called plant bugs, which are a type of true bug (Hemiptera) in the family Miridae that are generally associated with plants. Within Miridae, there is a particular genus of insects known as Pseudoloxops—I called them the green flash bugs because they have this very distinct shiny, bright green appearance. Someone had done a survey on the remote Austral Islands of French Polynesia and found a bunch of these bugs, but no one knew what they were. I love that spirit of discovery, so I started to develop a project around these particular types of bugs on these remote islands.

What did you find?

There had only been one study of these bugs before, and it was done 100 years ago. The study presented a hypothesis that there are six species and identified where they were on what islands. The act of identifying species is a hypothesis-driven process done by taxonomists, who take a group of individual specimens and come up with a hypothesis of where the boundaries are between species. In the past, what taxonomists did was describe species based on their morphology. They would take big groups of specimens and group them into bins of similar-looking organisms, which they thought represented species that were reproductively isolated and different from each other. 

I came in to test those century-old hypotheses with a lot more tools at my disposal. When DNA sequencing technology emerged, people could actually examine DNA to look at the genetics and the genes of specimens. That changed the game—it led to what I think of as a more complete and rigorous way to approach taxonomy, which is to take every possible line of evidence that could distinguish different species and examine that for as many specimens as you can. So my approach, in an integrated taxonomy framework, was to collect as many of these plant bugs as I could and then, for each individual specimen, measure and describe its morphology but also sequence its DNA and record what plant and island it’s found on. In doing that, I found an additional 17 species and confirmed three of the original six species. The other three species were what we call sunk—in other words, our research found these are actually the same species and that they're not different. 

How did you settle on the names of these new species?

The first year I was in Mo’orea, I taught kids about biodiversity and insect biodiversity through the local elementary school. So when it came time to name the species, I thought it was really important to have them involved not only because these kids had helped me collect specimens, but because the insects are endemic to those islands. I gave the students pictures and information about each species and its characteristics, and then they came up with names in Tahitian to give to the species. Those names were checked by my collaborator, Hinano Murphy, who runs the nonprofit cultural association called Te Pu Atitia in Tahiti. She's also involved with the Gump Station in Mo’orea. She helped check all the names. I also named one in honor of Rava Taputuarai, a Tahitian botanist.

Among the newly identified plant bugs are species named after Tahitian botanist Ravahere Taputuarai (far left); the Tahitian words ti’a pa’I (huge), and topara’a mahana (sunset); and actor Harrison Ford, Vice President Kamala Harris, and entomologist Pete Oboyski. Photo courtesy of Balukjian and Van Dam (2024)

Pete Oboyski, now executive director of the Essig Museum of Entomology, collected the specimens of one species and worked with me on Mo’orea at the time. I wanted to honor him with the name of the species (Pseudoloxops oboyskii) that he had collected. And I’ve always liked Harrison Ford as an actor, but he’s also been an advocate for conservation and works on the board of Conservation International. So, I wanted to honor him for his work in that space with the name of one species (Pseudoloxops harrisonfordi).

I also named one species (Pseudoloxops kamalaharrisae) after Vice President Kamala Harris. This all happened before she was the Democratic nominee for president—I actually proposed this name years ago because it takes a while to get through the publication process. I appreciated that she was from Oakland because after I finished grad school, I built a whole community college program at Merritt College called Natural History and Sustainability, which focused on training students to get local environmental jobs. Around the same time, she and President Biden created the American Climate Corps, which is a nationwide initiative to train more environmental workers. It dovetails very nicely with the work that I did at Merritt, so I wanted to name a species in honor of her.

Can you tell us more about your work at Merritt?

When I was growing up, I was basically told that if I really loved animals, plants, and bugs, then I should get a PhD. I loved my experience in grad school, but I also realize that some people might not want to do four years of undergrad and then seven years of a PhD just to pursue their passion for nature. I wanted to give them a pathway that could get them going more quickly.

Merritt had great classes on natural history and environmental classes, but at that point, the program was really geared toward older people who just wanted to come in for their own learning or enrichment. There’s a pressing need for more environmental work, and fortunately, we're in the Bay Area where there's so much of that work that can be done. We decided to recast the Natural History and Sustainability program as a career education and certificate program that gives you internship experience and gets you connected with potential employers. Students have gone on to entry-level jobs in environmental consulting; within the East Bay Regional Park District and at state and national parks; or at nonprofits. 

Balukjian hopes to return to Tahiti to launch a program to teach educators how they can use local biodiversity within educational standards to teach science topics. Photos courtesy of Brad Balukjian.

Do you hope to continue educational outreach in French Polynesia? 

One of my greatest thrills is that, when I was in Mo’orea for a year and teaching fifth grade, one of my students went on to found and run this amazing nonprofit called Coral Gardeners. It’s one of the biggest nonprofit successes in Tahiti, and he was in my classroom. But when that year ended, the infrastructure and program that I had built continued for only another year or two because it was only temporarily funded. What I really want to do is help create a permanent scientific and educational infrastructure in Mo’orea classrooms, so that I can help train teachers to use this curriculum whether I'm there or not. 

The Manumanu project will be independent of outside forces. I want to give teachers a manual about how they can use local biodiversity within educational standards to teach science topics and get kids excited about their own biodiversity. The idea is to offer a four-week program involving four different schools. We’ll go to a fifth-grade classroom in each school and teach them how to identify seven common orders of insects. We’ll give them the lessons in basic insect biodiversity and identification, then we’ll go out in the field and collect as many insects as we can. Because my specialty is these plant bugs, we would be able to identify those all the way down to the species level. But insects are so diverse that the rest of the insects we’ll identify down to the order. They’ll learn how to collect and identify insects using microscopes and come up with a total of how many species each classroom found. In the last week, we’ll have a science fair for the community, where students can present their specimens and findings to the public. 

The idea is that by doing this at schools in different parts of the island, you can compare diversity and abundance between different locations. In future years, once the teachers have been trained on that curriculum, they can continue doing it while I would work with four schools on a different island and train the next set. If it goes as planned, you would get 25 years of data from the first four schools in Mo’orea, and then you'd have additional data from other islands to compare the insects on all these different islands over time.

READ MORE:

• 17 New Species of Plant Bugs Identified in French Polynesia, With Help of Local Students (Entomology Today)
• Kamala is bug: Bay Area biologist names new species for the veep (San Francisco Standard)
• I named a bug after Kamala Harris. Here’s Why (San Francisco Chronicle Op-Ed)

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A gray wolf with a satellite tracking collar navigates a forest road in Lassen County, California. Photo by UC Berkeley/California Wolf Project (CAWP)

After nearly a century of absence from California, gray wolves (Canis lupus)  have made their return to the state. The species disappeared across the state in the 1920s, and the next documented sighting wasn't until 2011 when individual wolves were noted entering California from Oregon.

A new, long-term partnership between researchers at Rausser College of Natural Resources and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) will advance the science and management of gray wolves in California. 

With additional support from the National Geographic Society, the California Wolf Project (CAWP) brings together scientists, wildlife managers, and conservation communicators working with diverse stakeholders to better understand the social and ecological factors that shape wolf populations and inform management decisions. The new project integrates UC Berkeley’s expertise in ecology, sociology, economics, and environmental policy while leveraging the university’s extensive network of agency, non-profit, landowner, and Tribal relationships. The CAWP team uses innovative and interdisciplinary methods to gather data on wolf spatial ecology, diet, predator-prey dynamics, and recolonization within California while contributing to conflict reduction strategies for rural communities and livestock producers.

“It is exciting to see wolves back in California, but there are a lot of questions about where they fit amongst a rapidly changing landscape with new challenges for agencies and livestock producers,” said Arthur Middleton, CAWP co-lead and Goertz Professor of Wildlife Management at UC Berkeley. “We hope our growing team can provide new support to those interested in and impacted by the state’s growing wolf population.” 

Wolves are classified as endangered both under the California Endangered Species Act and the federal Endangered Species Act. As of 2024, CDFW has reported at least seven wolf packs across California. CAWP is initially focusing on the Beyem Seyo (Plumas County), Harvey (Lassen and Shasta counties), Lassen (Lassen and Plumas counties), and Whaleback (Siskiyou County) packs. The program has also started to expand its work with the Yowlumni Pack (Tulare County), with the help of CDFW's Central Region staff. CDFW continues to survey for the presence of uncollared and collared wolves based on sighting reports and other signs of wolf activity. 

California’s wolf packs utilize large expanses of habitat compared to other areas in the western United States, presenting challenges for monitoring the population and questions regarding the availability of prey. The state and many landowners are mounting a variety of livestock protection and conflict reduction efforts while learning new lessons about their efficacy. CAWP will complement the state’s efforts with rigorous research and an outreach strategy for collaborating with local communities affected by wolf activity. 

“Given the wolf population increases we’ve recorded in the last few years and the management challenges that have resulted, there’s no better time for this partnership between CDFW and UC Berkeley,” said Axel Hunnicutt, the State Gray Wolf Coordinator at CDFW. “There are so many important management questions relating to the ecological, economic, and social effects of wolf recolonization in the state that already impact California’s ecosystems and its people. The formation of CAWP is expanding our capacity to address these questions in earnest.” 

The path of wolf recovery in California—the most populous and diverse US state—has the potential to shape national, and even global, perspectives on wildlife restoration and large-scale conservation. CAWP seeks to develop a model for bringing universities, government agencies, and local communities together around the science and practice of improving human-wildlife interactions on a shared landscape. 

“The Wildlife Program at UC Berkeley is committed to fulfilling our university’s mandate to support the people, economies, and nature of California with science, education, and outreach. CAWP embodies those priorities and embraces the diversity of perspectives that accompany the recovery of large carnivores,” said Justin Brashares, CAWP co-lead and a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at UC Berkeley.

Learn more at the California Wolf Project website get updates via Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn.

For media inquiries, email: californiawolfproject@berkeley.edu 
For research inquiries, email: wolffieldteam@berkeley.edu

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Left: Assistant Professor Patricia Lang (back to camera), discusses her research on plant response to climate change. Right: Under Secretary Jacobs-Young (center) in discussion with Katerina Estera-Molina (left), Rausser College Director of Agriculture and Natural Resource Programs Dennis Baldocchi (right), and Vice Chancellor for Research Katherine Yelick (far right). Photos by Mathew Burciaga.

By Julie Gipple

As part of a visit to campus last week, Rausser College of Natural Resources was honored to host Dr. Chavonda Jacobs-Young, USDA Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics and USDA's Chief Scientist, for a visit at the UC Berkeley’s Oxford Facility. 

Located on the northwest side of the Berkeley campus, the Oxford Facility provides specialized plant growth facilities, an insectary, field space, services, and expertise to support the University’s plant science research and teaching needs. The Oxford Facility has long served as a core research infrastructure supporting Rausser College’s role as an Agricultural Experiment Station, along with counterparts at UC Davis, Riverside, Santa Cruz, and Merced.

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Myeong-Je Cho (right) explains his group’s work on gene editing for disease resistance in cacao plants to Under Secretary Jacobs-Young (far left) and other tour visitors. Photo by Mathew Burciaga

After attending a Climate Summit held at the Innovative Genomics Institute, the Under Secretary was able to join Rausser College for a tour of the Oxford Facility’s greenhouse and field space, during which she heard from graduate students, researchers, and early-career faculty about various research projects being conducted there. 

“Students, staff and faculty were able to show the Under Secretary their cutting edge research on agriculture and plant science. These projects are examples of the kinds of efforts needed to develop sustainable, productive agricultural systems of the future,” said Dennis Baldocchi, Rausser College’s Executive Associate Dean Baldocchi is also the College’s Director of Agriculture and Natural Resource Programs, a  role that involves serving as the UC Berkeley representative to UC's Agricultural and Natural Resources (ANR) Program Council, which advises the Vice-President of ANR. “This work can only flourish with proper facilities and equipment. Support and updates for the Oxford Facility will be instrumental in ensuring their continuation and success,” Baldocchi added. “Because many agricultural research facilities supported by USDA are suffering from deferred maintenance, this visit by the Under Secretary was timely and allowed us to show her the state of our facilities.” 

“Fortifying agriculture's scientific infrastructure at colleges, universities and federal facilities across the nation is critical for the future of food, fiber and fuel,” said Jacobs-Young. “Our world-class scientists deserve well-equipped, modernized buildings and equipment to tackle our biggest challenges, protect our food supply, and keep innovating at the pace that has historically given us all an abundant, safe and nutritious food supply.”

During the tour, the group visited six stations. Myeong-Je Cho, director and principle investigator of the Innovative Genomics Institute’s Plant Genomics Transformation Facility, discussed his group’s work on cacao transformation and gene editing for disease resistance in cacao plants. He noted that major portions of the world’s cacao—crucial for the production of chocolate—are grown in areas that are severely impacted by the stressors of climate change. When factoring in the impact of untreatable diseases like black pod disease and cacao swollen shoot virus (CSSV), cacao production worldwide is expected to drop by 11% this year alone. Cho outlined his group’s CRISPR-based genome-editing and genetic transformation strategies being explored for their potential to make cacao plants with more robust immune systems and increased resistance to infections.

Patricia Lang, an assistant professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, discussed her work studying how plants respond to climate change. Currently focusing on the model plant Arabidopsis, Lang’s lab combines bioinformatics and molecular biology and utilizes historical collections to understand how and why plants are flowering earlier than they used to. They identify historical changes and then re-engineer them and “de-extinct” them into plants to test their effects on a phenotype in the greenhouse and under simulated climate change conditions, both past, present, and future.

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Kiflom Aregawi outlines the Lemaux lab’s research on techniques aimed at increasing carbon sequestration capabilities of sorghum. Photo by Mathew Burciaga.

Researcher Katerina Estera-Molina explained research going on in the Environmental Plant Isotope Chamber Dynamic Ecosystem Labeling Facility. Chambers in the facility are used to verify and quantify agricultural crops being developed for climate change mitigation. They can control carbon dioxide and methane conditions in growing chambers and later measure how much carbon ends up in the soil, the microbes, and the plants themselves, thus quantifying if the developed plants are “doing better” than their “wild type.” Estera-Molina, who is a project manager in the labs of Jennifer Pett-Ridge and Professor Mary Firestone, highlighted an IGI project involving growing different rice genotypes with the intent of elongating plant roots to potentially store carbon in the ground. 

Kiflom Aregawi, a research associate in the lab of Cooperative Extension Professor Peggy Lemaux, discussed their group’s research on sorghum, a crop that originated in East Africa and is known for its resilience to drought, flooding, and high temperatures. The crop is used for food for both humans and animals, as well as for bioenergy. However, previous genome modification attempts on sorghum were not efficient—only 5% of plants were engineered. Recently, the group utilized new approaches to increase the engineering rate to 50% and the editing rate to 95%. With the new transformation and editing strategies Aregawi and others are exploring multiple target genes related to photosynthesis, root architecture, and root exudates—all plant traits related to potentially improving carbon sequestration capabilities.

Armen Kelikian, a graduate student working in the lab of Professor Krishna Niyogi in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, discussed their group’s work related to photosynthetic efficiency in rice and other crops. The group is specifically focused on photoprotection, which plants modulate as light conditions change. Using CRISPR-Cas9, the team was able to alter the regulatory sequences of three photoprotective genes, which resulted in plants being able to respond more rapidly to changing light conditions. 

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Left: Graduate student Armen Kelikian explaining the Niyogi lab’s work related to photosynthetic efficiency in rice and other crops. Right: Graduate student Miguel Ochoa showed the tour group a field site for his research on cover crops and soil health. Photos by Mathew Burciaga.

 

Miguel Ochoa, a graduate student working with Professor Timothy Bowles in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, led the group to a research field outside the greenhouse buildings, one of two agricultural research sites at Berkeley. The other is the Gill Tract, three miles north of the main UC Berkeley campus. Both sites are open to student projects, and the Gill Tract is also home to a community farm. Ochoa’s doctoral research focuses on cover crops and soil health. Cover crops are not grown for commercial production but instead to conserve soil water and recycle nutrients back into soils. With support from a USDA-NIFA grant, Ochoa is leading a four-year trial to explore the tradeoffs involved in growing cover crops rather than commercial crops. Collaborators on the project include UC Santa Cruz researchers and thirty commercial partners. 

Over lunch, leaders of the Berkeley Food Institute, including Faculty Directors Susana Matias and Isabel ​Madzorera, shared the Institute’s work bringing Berkeley food and farm systems research to policymakers and community partners through its outreach and education efforts as part of BFI’s mission to support sustainable and just food systems. Matias and Madzorera highlighted the Institute’s Farm to School Incubator Grant Program Evaluation, looking at farmer benefits and environmental impacts of the state’s program, among other policy-oriented research initiatives. They also discussed the evaluation of Senate Bill 1000, a city and county planning law in California aimed at improving local planning to incorporate environmental justice elements into General Plans, including how to improve food access.  

For more information about research happening at the Oxford Facility, visit the Facility news page. 

Research News

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MCB postdoc Akanksha Thawani (Nogales & Collins Labs) was selected as a 2024 STAT Wunderkind. This award recognizes Thawani as an outstanding early-career scientist and is for her research on Unraveling the mysteries of ‘the next CRISPR’. Read more about the STAT Wunderkind award and Thawani. 

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It is with great sadness we report the passing of Bruce N. Ames, who served as professor of biochemistry from 1968 to 1989, and then professor of molecular and cell biology from 1989 to 2000, and thereafter as a senior scientist at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute from 2000 to 2018. Bruce was best known for the development of the Ames Test, a screen that made use of bacteria to test the mutagenic potential of natural and synthetic chemicals as a means to pinpoint possible carcinogens. He received many honors including the National Medal of Science, election to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal of the Genetics Society of America.
 

Former MCB graduate student David Baker (PhD 1989) shared in this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for computational protein design". While at Berkeley, he conducted his doctoral dissertation research on protein transport and protein trafficking in yeast in the lab of Professor Randy Schekman. Read more about Baker's research and Nobel Prize. 

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Assistant Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology Bronwyn Lucas and Assistant Professor (Affiliated) of Molecular Therapeutics Ziyang Zhang are both among the 2024 NIH Director's New Innovator Awardees.