UC Davis Entomologist Gifted with 'Magic' Cuckoo Wasps Shoes

By Kathy Keatley Garvey

DAVIS, CA -- She's known fondly as "The Wasp Woman" (wasps are her specialty) and now she may be known as "The Entomologist with the Magic Shoes."

Everyone can see her coming. And going.

Folks at the UC Davis Bohart Museum of Entomology recently gifted their director, Lynn Kimsey, with LED (light-emitting diode) tennis shoes that are hand-painted with cuckoo wasps (family Chrysididae), the group that she studies.

"I think adults deserve shoes with LEDs like they make for little kids," she said, smiling. "They didn't have light-up shoes when I was a little kid--and I think my kids were too old for them, too."

Undergraduate student Justin "Wade" Spencer, with camaraderie support from public education and outreach coordinator Tabatha Yang and senior museum scientist Steve Heydon got together with Nicole Tam, then an undergraduate student, and graduate students Charlotte Herbert, Ziad Khouri and Jessica Gillung to surprise her.

They ordered a pair of shoes online, and Herbert and Tam painted them. The wasp work is intricate. And when the LED lights flash, the shoes seem as magical and as enchanting as fireflies or lightning bugs.

"Everyone thinks they're awesome shoes," said Kimsey, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

Kimsey administers the world-renowned Bohart Museum of Entomology, which houses a global collection of some eight million insect specimens.

Her areas of expertise include insect biodiversity, systematics and biogeography of parasitic wasps, urban entomology and arthropod-related industrial hygiene.

Kimsey, who received both her undergraduate degree (1975) and her doctorate (1979) from UC Davis, joined the entomology faculty in 1989. The director of the Bohart Museum and executive director of the Bohart Museum Society since 1990, she has also served as interim chair and vice chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, now the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

Images via Kathy Keatley Garvey