Join MAWDC for our May Monthly Meeting! Mark your calendar!
The meeting will be held via Zoom (link below). MAWDC President Elizabeth Hargrave will kick things off with updates on club activities and fungi in the news. Culinary Chair April Thompson will share eye candy and showcase MAWDC’s work with edible mushrooms in her new segment, The Kitchen Table. Send her your pics at culinary@mawdc.org. Program Chair Annie Weissman will lead the virtual ID table, highlighting recent fungal finds from our iNaturalist project.
For our feature presentation, we are excited to welcome Dr. Ted Schultz! His talk is entitled, “The coevolution of fungus-farming ants and their fungal cultivars.”
Ted R. Schultz is a Research Entomologist in the Department of Entomology in the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History. His research is largely focused on fungus-farming ants, a group of around 250 species that began farming fungi for food around 66 million years ago, and he is particularly interested in the coevolution of the fungus-farming ants and the many fungal species that they cultivate. Ted has authored over 120 publications and edited and authored four books, including (with Richard Gawne and Peter N. Peregrine) the recent The Convergent Evolution of Agriculture in Insects and Humans(2022, MIT Press). During the past 33 years, his research has taken him on 32 field expeditions, excavating the nests of fungus-farming ants in 11 South and Central American countries, including 15 trips to diverse locations in Brazil. Ted received a Bachelor's degree in Biology in 1988 from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Entomology in 1995 from Cornell University. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an Adjunct Professor of Entomology at the University of Maryland in College Park.
Zoom Link:
https://zoom.us/j/96693690911?pwd=YWdyeXh1bHF1N1UyNjNieFovNWFUZz09
Meeting ID 966 9369 0911
Passcode 330827
One Tap Mobile +13017158592,,96693690911#,,,,*330827# US (Washington DC)
Find your local Zoom access number: https://us06web.zoom.us/u/kQ9hr47WO
