2018 September - 50 articles
One of the first tasks of worker honey bees (Apis mellifera) during their lifetime is to feed the larval offspring. In brief, young workers (nurse bees) secrete a special food jelly that contains a large amount of unique major royal jelly proteins (M...
Halyomorpha halys (Stål), or brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB), has become a major pest and nuisance for both agricultural growers and homeowners since its arrival in North America and Europe. The nutritional ecology of BMSB is important for un...
Anopheline mosquitoes are important vectors of human malaria. Next-generation sequencing opens new opportunities for studies of mosquito genomes to uncover the genetic basis of a Plasmodium transmission. Physical mapping of genome sequences to polyte...
Tephritid fruit flies require protein for sexual and gonotrophic development. Food-based lures are therefore widely used in strategies to detect and control fruit flies in the Tephritidae family. However, these baits are attractive to a broad range o...
Forest vegetation is essential for the population development of the spotted wing drosophila (SWD). Yet, little is known of how the structure of surrounding forest areas influence the abundance of SWD within orchards. In this work, we use data from a...
The assessment of acute toxicity to insect natural enemies is very important for insecticide selection used within integrated pest management (IPM). The acute toxicity of abamectin and imidacloprid against Encarsia formosa, a parasitoid of Bemisia ta...
Entomopathogenic nematodes (EPNs) are widely used as biological control agents against insect pests, the efficacy of these organisms strongly depends on the balance between the parasitic strategies and the immune response of the host. This review sum...
Many methods for trajectory simulation, such as Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT), have been developed over the past several decades and contributed greatly to our knowledge in insect migratory movement. To improve the...
The decline of pollinators in agricultural areas has been observed for some decades, this being partly due to landscape simplification in intensive agrosystems. Diversifying agricultural landscapes by sowing flower strips within fields could reduce t...
Mordellidae (tumbling flower beetles) is a globally distributed family of Coleoptera; it is among the most species-rich families (containing 115 genera and 2308 species described). It is important because of its agroforestry significance and its ecos...
The strategy of Aedes aegypti to prolong embryonic viability by quiescence has severe implications for geographic expansion and maintenance of mosquito populations in areas under control measures. We evaluated the effects of quiescence on biological...
Interspecific sexual interactions are not uncommon in animals. In sympatry, females often face the risk of accidentally mating with a heterospecific male. Based on the actual risks imposed by the environment at a given time and place, females should...
Aedes aegypti (Ae. aegypti) is a competent vector for transmitting important viral diseases such as yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya, and Zika. Several strategies have been applied to avoid Ae. aegypti proliferation by using environmental management...
Mosquitoes have distinct developmental and adult life history, and the vectorial capacity of females has been shown to be affected by the larval nutritional environment. However, little is known about the effect of developmental nutrition on insulin-...
Research on endangered British butterflies has found that butterfly populations in small refuges evolve to allocate more mass to the thorax (flight muscle) and less to the abdomen than populations in large refuges. The observed change in mass allocat...
Male horn dimorphism is a rather common phenomenon in dung beetles, where some adult individuals have well-developed head horns (i.e., major males), while others exhibit diminished horn length (i.e., minor males). We focused on horn dimorphism and as...
Spotted wing drosophila, Drosophila suzukii Matsumura, is a major pest of small fruit worldwide in temperate and subtropical growing regions. In Northern climates, D. suzukii likely overwinters locally under leaf litter and snow pack, but our underst...
Blow flies (Diptera: Calliphoridae) are carrion-breeding flies that are commonly used as evidence in forensic investigation. An adequate knowledge of ecological and geographical data of blow fly has a direct application in forensic science, as far as...
Different strains of Metarhizium exhibit a range of polymorphisms in colony phenotypes. These phenotypes range from highly conidiating colonies to colonies that produce relatively more mycelia and few conidia. These different phenotypes are exhibited...
Aedes aegypti is the principal vector of the urban arboviruses and the blood ingestion is important to produce the eggs in this species. To analyze the egg production in Ae. aegypti, researchers frequently use small cages or Drosophila vials to colle...
The coffee bean weevil, Araecerus fasciculatus (De Geer) (Coleoptera: Anthribidae), is a cosmopolitan insect with >100 hosts, and has been reported as a pest of stored coffee. During a study involving the coffee berry borer, we observed coffee bea...
Entomopathogenic microbes such as Spodoptera litura nucleopolyhedrovirus (SpltNPV), Metarhizium anisopliae, and Pseudomonas fluorescens are biological agents used for the control of multiple arthropod pests. The objective of this study was to assess...
Many of the almost 300 species of arthropod-pathogenic fungi in the Entomophthoromycotina (Zoopagomycota) are known for being quite host-specific and are able to cause epizootics. Most species produce two main types of spores, conidia and resting spo...
The assumption that vector abundance differences might drive spatial and temporal heterogeneities in vector-borne disease transmission is common, though data supporting it is scarce. Here, we present data from two common mosquito species Aedes aegypt...
Animals often aggregate at certain sites during vulnerable periods such as night-roosting as an anti-predatory strategy. Some migratory gregarious animals must regularly find new night-roosting sites, but how they synchronously choose such sites is p...
The Queensland fruit fly, Bactrocera tryoni, is Australia’s most important horticultural pest. The Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) has been used to control this species for decades, using radiation to sterilize males before field-release. This method...
Termites are abundant arthropods in tropical ecosystems and actively participate in the process of litter decomposition. The objective of this study was to evaluate the population structure of Microcerotermes indistinctus in arboreal nests and to est...
Mosquitoes live under the endless threat of infections from different kinds of pathogens such as bacteria, parasites, and viruses. The mosquito defends itself by employing both physical and physiological barriers that resist the entry of the pathogen...
Climate change is predicted to alter the geographic distribution of a wide variety of taxa, including butterfly species. Research has focused primarily on high latitude species in North America, with no known studies examining responses of taxa in th...
Lepidoptera, stink bugs, and weevils are important pests in soybean. For lepidopteran control, insecticides and seed treatments are used. As an alternative, Bt soybean was developed to control primary pests of Lepidoptera such as Rachiplusia nu (Guen...
Flies are the main competitors of dung beetles for oviposition sites and rolling dung beetles relocate their food to reduce interspecific competition. Furthermore, dung beetles deposit chemical substances on the food ball that may repel fly larvae an...
The leaf-footed bug Leptoglossus zonatus (Dallas) (Heteroptera: Coreidae) is an important pest in the Americas. However, no preference of colors, sexual behavior nor aggregation pheromone has been reported, which can be used for detection, monitoring...
Opportunistic bacteria are often ubiquitous and do not trigger disease in insects unless the conditions are specifically favorable for bacterial development in a suitable host. In this paper, we isolated and identified a bacterium, Pseudomonas aerugi...
The species complex of the mosquito Anopheles subpictus is designated by the sibling species A–D, depending on morphological characters of life cycle stages and variations in polytene chromosomes. However, morphological aberrations in the life...
Temperature acclimation and heat shock experiments were performed on adult oceanic skaters, Halobates germanus, inhabiting the tropical Pacific Ocean. Acclimation for 10 or 24 h to 25 °C or 28 °C promoted significantly lower cool coma tempera...
Most stored-grain pest insects increase their population within a relatively short time, causing serious damage to stored products. Sitophilus oryzae (L.) is one of the world’s major stored-grain pest insects and was chosen as the model insect...
The relationship between predator and prey size was studied in the buprestid hunting wasp Cerceris fumipennis Say in eight widely distributed nesting aggregations in North Carolina, USA. Initial work indicated a significant linear relationship betwee...
The observed decline in wild bees may be connected to the decreasing diversity of flowering plants. Changes in floral composition shape nutrient availability in inhabited areas, and bee larvae need food rich in body-building nutrients to develop into...
Baculoviruses are arthropod-specific large DNA viruses that orally infect the larvae of lepidopteran, hymenopteran and dipteran insect species. These larvae become infected when they eat a food source that is contaminated with viral occlusion bodies...
Flooding can increase tree susceptibility to root rot pathogens as well as attacks by ambrosia beetles attracted to stress-induced ethanol emissions. The objective of this study was to investigate the interaction of a preventative fungicide treatment...
Halyomorpha halys (Stål) (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) is an invasive pest of numerous agricultural crops with an increasing global distribution. Finding simple and reliable monitoring tools for H. halys agricultural and surveillance programs is im...
We assessed the relationships between site size, habitat quality, landscape factors (fragmentation, landscape diversity) and species richness in communities of Collembola in 50 small dry grassland habitat patches in an agricultural landscape of easte...
Plant pathogens can profoundly affect host plant quality as perceived by their insect herbivores, with potentially far-reaching implications for the ecology and structure of insect communities. Changes in host plants may have direct effects on the li...
We investigated the importance of protein nutrition for honey bee immunity. Different protein diets (monofloral pollen of Helianthus spp., Sinapis spp., Asparagus spp., Castanea spp., a mixture of the four different pollen and the pollen substitute F...
Aedes aegypti mosquitoes infected with the wMel strain of Wolbachia are being deployed to control the spread of arboviruses around the world through blockage of viral transmission. Blockage by Wolbachia in some scenarios may be affected by the suscep...
Background: The discovery of natural products to improve the reproductive performance of mass-reared predators is an important aim for successful augmentative biological control. We tested the hypothesis that quercetin (a bioflavonoid) stimulates ovi...
Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) characterizes and dominates the sagebrush steppe, the largest temperate semi-desert ecosystem in North America. The beneficial arthropod fauna hosted by A. tridentata is poorly known but could be of importance to...
The pea leaf weevil, Sitona lineatus, is an important pest of field peas and faba beans worldwide. Present sampling techniques that rely on detection of adult feeding damage are labor intensive, time consuming and require repeated sampling. Semiochem...
Sugarcane is one of the most valuable crops in the world. Native and exotic Lepidopteran stemborers significantly limit sugarcane production. However, the identity and genetic diversity of stemborers infesting sugarcane in Malawi is unknown. The main...
The main objective of this study was to investigate the effects of the insecticidal compound spinosad on the survival, reproduction, and immune functions of the Mediterranean fruit fly. The lethal and sub-lethal effects were determined on Ceratitis c...
