SOLTRANS SURVEY

Solano County Transit (SolTrans) is reaching out to the community to get rider feedback on their transit needs. SolTrans planning staff is beginning to assemble a plan for the community’s transit future and possible post COVID-19 service restoration in 2021. SolTrans needs your feedback on this survey to create a plan that serves you, the passengers.

SolTrans is making the survey available in English and Spanish online at SolTrans.org, in person at the Vallejo Transit Center or via SolTrans customer service at (707) 468-4666 and will be open through October.

“COVID-19 has changed so much in the way we provide service in our community. We are aware that everyone has had a shift in their transit needs during this challenging time, our job is to be ready for these changes and make sure the service we put out meets the needs of our neighbors within the restraints of our budgetary confinements of course.” said Beth Kranda, SolTrans Executive Director.

Since the start of COVID-19, SolTrans has taken this pandemic seriously and has increased cleaning protocols on vehicles and at transit centers, added disinfecting units at Vallejo Transit Center, implemented facial coverings and social distancing, as well as enforcing capacity limits on the buses and more to help combat the spread of the disease.

Please help the SolTrans planning team by filling out the survey at https://bit.ly/3kl4Zc5. Plans and feedback will be developed into a rebuilding plan that will be based on funding in the coming year. Thank you for your help in keeping us moving safely and as healthy as possible.

SPIDER NAMED

The newly discovered trapdoor spider has a name.

When UC Davis professor Jason Bond discovered a new genus of trapdoor spiders at Moss Landing State Park, Monterey County, and named the genus Cryptocteniza, he launched a “naming-of-the-species” contest.

The contest, beginning in mid-May and ending June 1, drew more than 200 suggestions from all over the world.

And now, Bond and fellow entomologists have selected a winner.

Entomologist Kirsten Pearsons, an alumnus of UC Davis  who received her doctorate in entomology in August from Pennsylvania State University, submitted the winning name, “kawtak.”

So it’s official: the trapdoor spider–or what Bond calls “the new endangered living fossil found on a sandy beach on a seashore along California’s central coast”–is Cryptocteniza kawtak.

“The derivation of the specific epithet is Native American – from the Mutsun word for seashore,” said Bond, a noted spider authority and the Evert and Marion Schlinger Endowed Chair in Insect Systematics, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. The Mutsun Indians lived near Mission San Juan Bautista.

In a forthcoming scientific journal article on the spider’s phylogeny, evolution, biogeography and discovery, Pearsons will be credited with naming the species.