Office: 67 Briggs Hall
Lab: 69 Briggs Hall
Phone: (530) 752-6217
Email: jrcarey@ucdavis.edu
Fax: (530) 752-1537

James R. Carey, Ph.D.   
Professor of Entomology

Prof. Carey's Lab Research

Education:

B.S. Animal Ecology, Iowa State University

M.S. Entomology, Iowa State University

Ph.D. Entomology, University of California, Berkeley

Appointment:

25% Instruction and Research
75% Organized Research

Teaches:

Entomology 117 (cross-listed with Human Development 117): "Longevity"; Freshman Seminar: "Methuselah revisisted: social and biological determinants of longevity"

Research Interests:

http://www.biodemographyworld.org

Overview and Research Networks

My main research focus is insect biodemography (i.e. the marriage of biology and demography) with special emphasis on aging and lifespan. The graduate students (Amy Morice; James Harwood) and postdoc (Freerk Molleman) in my laboratory and many of the research scientists with whom I collaborate use insects as models to address questions concerned with lifespan limits, the male-female longevity gap, dietary restriction, aging in wild populations, the effects of anti-aging drugs on longevity, morbidity and mortality dynamics, and the effects of behavior throughout the life course on survival and mortality. The majority of this research is supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging. The first and longest running is Exceptional longevity in fruit flies, a research project within the Duke University-based program project (P01) titled Exceptional Longevity that is directed by James Vaupel, Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. The second research project is Aging in the Wild, part of the UC Davis-based program project (P01) that I direct titled Biodemographic Determinants of Lifespan and with co-directors Shripad Tuljapurkar (Stanford) and Kenneth Wachter (UC Berkeley).

Current Projects

• Mexico. In long-term cooperation with my former PhD student Dr. Pablo Liedo, Director General of El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR) and, more recently with Drs. Sige Zou (NIH) and Donald Ingram (Louisiana State), our research program in Mexico is located in a laboratory on the grounds of the fruit fly mass rearing facility (Mosca Fruita) in the small southern town of Metapa near Tapachula. Although our earlier work focused on the Mediterranean fruit fly, the facility discontinued rearing adults of this species and thus we switched to using the Mexican fruit fly (Anastrepha ludens) as our primary research model. Our recent research on the Mexfly concerns questions on the effects on survival and reproduction of food restriction, artificial impairment (e.g. leg amputation), and of anti-aging compounds (e.g. resveratrol; cranberry extract). We are also in the process of refining an electronic behavior monitoring system designed to record the behavior and movement patterns of individual flies throughout their lives.
• Greece. Another long-term research collaboration on aging and longevity involves studies on the medfly with several key Greek colleagues including Drs. Byron Katsoyannnos and Nikos Kouloussis at the University of Thessaloniki, and Dr. Nikos Papadopoulos at the University of Volos. Laboratory research on the medfly in Greece including studies comparing the life history traits of medfly biotypes from Kenya, Greece, Madiera, Brazil, Guatemala and Hawaii, the influence of different diets on lifetime patterns of ‘supine behavior’ (tendency to lie on their backs for sustained periods), age-specific and lifetime patterns of calling behavior in individual males, and the cost of reproduction (courting; mating; insemination) in male medflies (this research was conducted in Tapachula, Mexico by Dr. Papadopoulos). For field research we are attempting to develop a new method for studying aging in the wild that we refer to as the captive cohort method—an approach based on the concept that the death distribution of wild-caught flies in the laboratory will reflect the age distribution of the populations from which they were derived (i.e. captured).
• Uganda. A more recent research project on aging in insects is the one developed by postdoc Freerk Molleman as an extension of his PhD research on the evolution and population biology of fruit-feeding butterflies in Kibale National Park located in western Uganda. An important cornerstone of this project is the mark recapture study on over 40 species of fruit-feeding butterflies that showed that many species have a potential for extraordinary long lifespans. We have a mark-recapture data set on forty-six species of fruit-feeding butterflies with >30,000 marked individuals, of which >4000 were recaptured at least once collected over a five year period (and for some selected species 2 years additional data). Data on captive lifespans are available for wild-caught butterflies of several species, including Bicyclus species and from lab reared butterflies.