Alumni News

The latest half-day conference in this highly popular series is set for June 17, so mark your calendars and don’t skip town. Actually, you could fly off and still access all of the guest speakers, since the Virtual Invasive Pest Mini-Conference will be brought to you via Zoom. “Our CTAHR speakers will talk about exotic pests in Hawaiʻi (pests of Taro and Honeybees), while our guest speakers from the mainland universities will talk about current invasive pest concerns that could potentially threaten Hawaiʻi (Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, Spotted Lanternfly),” says Roshan Manandhar. “They’ll cover current pest status, as well as their management and Extension strategies.”

He adds, “We should learn a lot from their experiences, and be better informed if any of these invasive pests appear here in the Islands.”

Sign up now. For questions, contact Roshan.

If you missed the premiere of the 55th annual UHM Fashion Show, it’s not too late to catch the designs and virtual show of our talented students. Tune in this Sunday, May 16, at 5:30 p.m. on KFVE. The show also airs multiple times on ‘Olelo channel 53. Or, you can visit Hawai’i News Now. The virtual fashion show features collections from three senior undergraduate students in the Fashion Design and Merchandising program of the Dept. of Family and Consumer Sciences, as well as 2020 fashion design student graduates. The runway footage was shot by the students — all on their smartphones.

Read the full story on UH News.

Expanded restoration of indigenous practices will more than compensate for projected losses of endangered waterbird habitat. That’s the finding of researchers from the Dept. of Natural Resources and Environmental Management, which they hope will provide useful information in discussions at the federal level to down-list the endangered aeʻo to the level of “threatened.” While the ae‘o population has been increasing in the past decades, it has not yet reached 2,000 individuals—a key threshold for downlisting.

“Much of the aeʻo’s core nesting habitat, which is the foundation of its increasing population numbers, is projected to be gone by 2100 due to sea-level rise,” says Kristen Harmon, a PhD candidate. 

“Aeʻo only have a 7% survival rate from egg to fledging due to heavy predation from invasive mammals, birds, bullfrogs, and even crabs!” adds Melissa Price. “That’s a very concerning level of survival, unlikely to result in recovery unless we can address the invasive predator and nesting habitat issues.”

Read the full story in UH News. Read the full scientific article, The role of indigenous practices in expanding waterbird habitat in the face of rising seas.

Insect ecology, insect taxonomy, pest management, urban entomology, and toxicology just scratch the exoskeleton of topics that grad students might be called upon to answer during the Entomological Society of America’s ‘Entomology Games’ contest. At this year’s regional matchups, the CTAHR entomology grad student team came in second place in the Pacific Branch. Congrats (and good luck at nationals) to Mitchell Kirsch, Michelle Au, David Honsberger, and Karim Gharbi. These grad students in the lab of Mark Wright and the lab of Jia-Wei Tay, Dept. of Plant and Environmental Protection Sciences, will face off against students from other universities in the national ‘Entomology Games’ contest this November, during the ESA’s annual meeting in Denver.

“This series of entomology trivia contests will test our PEPS students’ knowledge of a broad spectrum of entomology facts – often very bizarre questions,” says Mark. “They’ll be challenged with a diverse array of entomology trivia, which can be obscure and difficult. But I know they’ll do CTAHR proud; they have great teachers.”J

Read more about the games.

Consumers across America are beginning to eat at restaurants again. But as they return to their favorite haunts, so has the question about whether the main course was raised on antibiotics. “With the increasing demand for meat from antibiotic-free grown animals and legal restrictions on it in certain jurisdictions, there is an urgent need to find alternative approaches to raise animals in the post-antibiotic era,” says Rajesh Jha of the Dept. of Human Nutrition, Food, and Animal Sciences. “A proper nutritional strategy,” he adds, “is essential to handling intestinal challenges of these young animals. This can be achieved by a wise selection of feedstuffs and supplementing nutrients or compounds that possess functional roles in improving the intestinal health.”

Rajesh and co-editor Sung Woo Kim of North Carolina State U. have recently published “Nutritional Intervention for the Intestinal Health of Young Monogastric Animals.” The eBook is intended to provide updated, critical resources on nutritional manipulation and the use of functional compounds to cope with intestinal challenges that young animals suffer upon weaning or hatching, especially by monogastric animals like pigs and poultry.

“We hope the book will serve as a handy and useful reference for researchers and livestock industry, and will contribute to healthy and sustainable animal production,” Rajesh adds. Related reviews and research papers are also available on Rajesh’s lab website.