THE NEW YORK ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY, INC.

Caddisflies: Underwater Architects

(note day change to Thursday this month)

 

Speakers:

Wayne Gall, Ph.D.

Regional Entomologist

New York State Department of Health, Buffalo, NY

 

Louis N. Sorkin, B.C.E.

Division of Invertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History

New York, NY

 

Where:                Linder Theater, AMNH, enter West 77th Street entrance

Date:                    THURSDAY (not Tuesday) March 17, 2016

Time:                    7 PM to 8:30 PM

 

Production of silk by caddisfly larvae has led to the ecological diversification & evolutionary success of the insect order Trichoptera. Caddisfly larvae employ silk (excreted from salivary glands near their mouths) in elegant ways to construct fixed retreats, food-filtering nets, and portable tube-cases under water.  Caddisflies are often loosely segregated into three behavioral groups based on their use of silk: net-making caddisflies, case-making caddisflies, and free-living caddisflies, the latter of which only produce silken structures prior to pupation. Net-making caddisflies usually live in running water, and their nets that are typically made among aquatic vegetation, serve both as a means to collect algae, detritus, and animal food and as larval retreats. Case-making caddisflies may build cases exclusively of silk, but more commonly the silk holds together substrate materials such as small fragments of rock, sand, small twigs or aquatic plants. Caddisfly cases are open at both ends, the larva draws oxygenated water through the posterior end, over their gills, and out of the wider anterior end. As they grow, larvae enlarge and lengthen the anterior end. Please join us and hear Wayne’s presentation on these most interesting “hair wing” insects.

 

Wayne Gall has been Regional Entomologist in the Western Regional Office of the New York State Department of Health since November 2001.  From 1989-2001 Wayne served as Associate Curator of Invertebrate Zoology then Curator of Entomology at the Buffalo Museum of Science.  Wayne earned his BA in Biology at SUNY Buffalo, MS in Entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and PhD in Zoology from the University of Toronto where he studied the systematics of limnephiloid caddisflies with the late Glenn Wiggins.

 

 

Dinner:      Senn Thai Comfort Food, 452 Amsterdam Avenue

 

Society meetings are always open to the public with no admission charge.

 

Past Monthly Meetings

February 2016

October 2015