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| SEXY ORCHIDS A RAW DEAL FOR WASPS |
| Some orchids are sexual deceivers, tricking male wasps into pollination by mimicking females. Now an Australian experiment has found the deception is actually harmful to the female wasps, whose males reject them in favour of the flowers. |
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| SOCIAL IMMUNITY |
| Creatures that live in social groups have a greater risk of infectious disease, but according to new research living in a group can also provide a health advantage. |
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| INSECT PEST OF POTATOES TECIA SOLANIVORA HITS CROPS IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CANARY ISLANDS |
| International Symposium on Guatemalan moth in Quito, Ecuador
Lepidopteran Tecia solanivora, an insect pest, is currently devastating potato crops in Latin and Central America. Equador is particularly badly hit. |
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| SOCIAL INSECTS COULD OFFER CLUES ABOUT GENETIC CONFLICT |
| Two Rice University biologists believe social insects like ants and bees could provide clues to why some animals -- including humans -- have developed a curious quality in which the genes of their parents vie in direct competition, waging a kind of biochemical war. |
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| MOVEMENT WITHOUT SENSES CODED INTO NEURONS, SAYS RESEARCHER |
| Embryonic motor systems intrinsic to central nervous systems and not dependent on sensory cues
An animal's ability to move - like the kicking of a developing baby or the crawling and walking of insects - is intrinsic, not dependent on sensory stimulation, says a U of T neurobiologist. |
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| FLYING HIGH |
| What do the hawkmoth, the fruit fly, and the bird-wrasse fish all have in common? Over millions of years, each of these animals seems to have figured out how to achieve high-lift in their respective medium…. quickly, and with more stability and less heave, pitch, yaw, torque, drag and cavitation than man-made machines have yet been able to approach. |
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| INSECT BITES ON PLANTS REDUCE PHOTOSYNTHESIS, IMAGING DEVICE SHOWS |
| When insects feed on plants, they get nourishment and the plant gets damaged. The amount of damage has taken on new light, thanks to a new photosynthesis-measuring device that illuminates and photographs never-before-seen injury extending far beyond an insect’s bite. |
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| EXPOSING INSECTS' SENSE OF SMELL |
| A key step in insects' sense of smell has been uncovered by researchers in Switzerland, the United States and Japan. The discovery could lead to insecticides that stop insects from communicating through chemical signals. |
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| MEGA COCKROACH |
| A 300-million-year-old cockroach fossil has been found in a mine site in the United States. And it's huge.
The cockroach, which lived in the Carboniferous period, 55 million years before dinosaurs, was found in a coal mine in eastern Ohio by Cary Easterday, a graduate student in geological science at Ohio State University. |
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| CLIMATE CHANGES MOSQUITO'S GENES |
| The pitcher plant mosquito is probably the world's first documented genetic adaptation of an animal to global warming, a 30-year study has found. |
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| BUMPY BEETLE COLLECTS ITS OWN WATER |
| A beetle may help humans solve the problem of finding drinking water in the desert.
UK researchers have discovered that the tenebrionid beetle (Stenocara sp.), from the Namib Desert in southern Africa, has a tailor-made covering for collecting water from early-morning fog. |
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| CATERPILLARS MAKE NOISE TO FEND OFF INTRUDERS, RESEARCHERS DISCOVER |
| Caterpillars defend their homes by drumming up vibrations with their mandibles to drive intruders away, scientists say. At times, the nest-owner and intruder engage in duels that create a symphony of drum-like sounds. |
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| MITEY HAPLOIDS AREN'T HAPLESS AFTER ALL |
| A truly bizarre species of tiny spider-like creatures that consists entirely of females, has no need for sex and is biologically-speaking "a sandwich short of a picnic" is turning on its head conventional scientific wisdom. |
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| INFECTIOUS ILLNESSES ENCOURAGES SPLITTING OF SOME WASP SPECIES |
| Feeding of minute wasps with antibiotics shows that diseases encourages the birth of a new wasp species, thus developing evolution process; that’s how researchers from New York think.
Scientists from the University of Rochester consider that each of the two closely linked species of the Nasonia group carries two separate types of the Wolbachia bacteria, which under certain circumstances initiate diseases related to the reproduction of these species. Wasps inhabiting remote areas of the USA lay eggs into a cocoon and fly away, not caring any longer of the prosperity. Before a female wasp lays eggs, a coupling process first takes place. Under artificially created conditions, when wasps of these two species could have a direct contact, they didn’t intersect with one another. However, as soon as the Wolbachia bacteria activated, they began to fall ill and at the same time produce some specific hormones which facilitated mutations in the reproductive cells. As a result, wasps of the same variety reproduced hybrids which had a lot in common with the species of the other variety. This posterity was featured with a perfect health.
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| DRYOCOCELUS INSECT, PREVIOUSLY CONSIDERED AS EXTINCT, HAS BEEN FOUND |
| A giant insect, which over the last 80 years was considered as extinct, still exists near a rocky tower on the How God Island. Dryococelus is the world’s biggest and rarely met insect; this invertebrate species is likely to be unique by its structure. These insects were pulled through from this island, the only one on the planet where they had lived, when rats from the vessel Mocambo taking the bottom in 1918, landed on the island together with cargo sailors brought. |
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