Barbie Craze Sweeps Briggs Hall at UC Davis Picnic Day
Marielle Hansel Friedman Designs EGSA T-Shirt Featuring Rosy Maple Moth
The Barbie craze, in the form of a rosy pink moth on a hot pink T-shirt, swept Briggs Hall, home of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, during the campuswide 110th annual UC Davis Picnic Day
Most of the entomology students wore pink “Bugbie” shirts--illustrated with a rosy maple moth, Dryocampa rubicunda--as they staffed the "bug" activities.
Briggs Hall got pinked.
The contrast was almost like seeing a flock of flamingos in a museum of darkling beetles.
Marielle Hansel Friedman, a second-year doctoral student in the lab of urban landscape entomologist Emily Meineke designed the t-shirts, which proved to be one of the best sellers in the Entomology Graduate Student Association (EGSA) booth.
“I want one, no, make that two,” a woman said as she zigzagged her way to the booth to buy the $25 t-shirts. “I loved the Barbie movie.”
She appeared to be “tickled pink.”
The story behind the story?
“I was swept up into the Barbie craze last year like so many others," Marielle said, "and loved all the promo posters they were doing for the movie. I saw some people on social media photoshopping themselves, and their pets, etc. into the promos and thought Wouldn’t it be cute to draw one with a bug and call it Bugbie?”
“I love moths," she added, "and had seen photos of rosy maple moths before, and thought it would be the perfect bug to put in the Bugbie promo because of its bright pink and yellow markings and adorable face.”
As its name implies, the rosy maple moth's preferred host trees are maples. Native to eastern North America, it's a small moth in the family Saturniidae, "the great silk moths."
ESGA sold a total of 482 shirts, with 60 of them Bugbie shirts, "putting it in our top three best sellers of the day!” Marielle commented.
She also designed the monarch butterfly, swallowtail butterfly, milkweed bug, and Bugbie stickers sold at Picnic Day as well.
Marielle, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, received her bachelor's degree in biology in 2015 from the University of Oregon. She lived in Portland, Ore., for a few years before opting to return to the Bay Area. She joined the UC Davis doctoral program in September 2022. She is advised by Meineke and research leader Paul Bratt of the Invasive Species and Pollinator Health Unit, USDA’s Agricultural Research Service.
Marielle worked as a biological science technician in Pratt’s unit from 2019 to 2022, and earlier was a research assistant in the Cresko Lab, Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University of Oregon.
Her doctoral work at UC Davis involves "exploring the role of urbanization in herbivory of non-native plants within the context of our changing climate."
Marielle co-authored a scientific research article, titled "Biology of Immature Stages and Host Range Characteristics of Sudauleutes bosqi (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), ;a Candidate Biological Control Agent of Exotic Ludwigia spp. in the USA," published in October 2022 in the Florida Entomologist . (See https://tinyurl.com/8csactwb)
Another research article she co-authored, on the "orangeworm development response to gaseous chlorine dioxide treatments," is pending publication in the Journal of Stored Products Research.
In her leisure time, Marielle enjoys cooking, hiking, gardening, playing guitar and piano, and creating art, using a variety of mediums such as knitting, sewing, drawing, embroidery and jewelry.
"During the COVID pandemic, I started a small jewelry business named Elytra Jewelry (on Instagram) where I sell ethically sourced butterfly and beetle wing earrings and polymer clay jewelry, in addition to a variety of sticker designs of native California insects.”
Marielle participates in pop-ups throughout the year and just launched a square website (linked on her Instagram account) to sell her jewelry.
Meanwhile, “Bugbie” is being sold on the EGSA T-shirt sales website at https://ucdavisentgrad.square.site/.
Other EGSA T-shirts feature such critters as beetles, cicadas, bees, nematodes (round worms), a whip scorpion, and a praying mantis. One T-shirt is lettered with "Would you still love me if I was a worm?"
Probably not as much as Bugbie...