What's New

Coached by Dr. William Lamp and captained by graduate student Bob Smith, UMD's Entomology department competed for the first time at the national level in the annual insect trivia competition at the 2008 meeting of the Entomological Society of America.

University of Maryland's annual Bioscience Day this year celebrates Darwin's life with a visit by his "ghost," a talk by Pulitzer-Prize-winning scientist E.O. Wilson, a session for high school teachers on teaching evolution in classrooms where faith and science sometimes clash, and revolutionary new findings in evolutionary science.

Birds, bees, bats and other species that pollinate North American plant life are in decline due to environmental stress and disease. What are the threats currently facing wild and managed pollinators and how can we reverse this trend? “Anybody who likes to eat should care about what’s happening to pollinators,” says Dr. David Hawthorne, Associate Professor of Entomology. “About 30% of our food depends on them.”  Hawthorne starting teaching the course Pollinators in Crisis in 2007, which he created for the Marquee Courses in Science and Technology program developed at the University of Maryland. “This class is an opportunity to talk about where our food comes from and how lots of parts of the natural world contribute to our food, and how those parts contribute to our well being in general,” Hawthorne explains.

Entomology Professor Jeffrey Shultz and Ph.D Student Andrew Sensenig have partnered with mechanical engineers from the A. James Clark School of Engineering, to identify a biological mechanism in young mayflies that could enable sensors in stagnant environments to make air or water flow past them so they can detect harmful substances.