#Emerald ash borers were in U s. long before first detectionnew research at Michigan State university shows that the uber-destructive emerald ash borer arrived at least 10 years before it was identified first in North america.
and Distributions shows that EABS were feasting on ash trees in southeast Michigan by the early 1990s well before this pest was discovered in 2002 said Deb Mccullough MSU professor of forest entomology.
or pallets imported from Asia where the beetle is said native she. There were probably only a few live beetles that arrived
but ash trees are common in urban landscapes as well as in forests. When they emerged there were likely ash trees nearby providing food for the beetles and their offspring.
Slender cores were collected from the trunk of more than 1000 ash trees across six counties in southeast Michigan.
and identifying key marker years the team was able to determine the year each tree was killed by emerald ash borers.
In addition this was the first study to use tree rings to track the spread of an invasive tree-feeding insect.
Emerald ash borers now have infested at least 22 states and two Canadian provinces and have become the most destructive and costly forest insect to ever invade North america Mccullough said.
Emerald ash borers are killing trees so fast across such a large geographic area that nobody actually knows how many trees are said dead she.
We do know there are tens of millions of dead ash in lower Michigan alone. Data from the tree ring study showed how the infestation grew and spread.
Some of the spread was natural--adult beetles flying from one ash tree to another. However new satellite populations were started by people transporting infested ash trees from nurseries or as logs and firewood.
or four generations of beetles have emerged and gone off to colonize new ash trees. In addition reports of declining ash trees were not uncommon in Michigan and surrounding states in the 1990s.
When shiny green beetles emerged from dying ash trees however researchers knew it was something out of the ordinary.
Specialists at the Smithsonian Institute and London's Museum of Natural history could not identify the beetles.
and similar beetles was able to identify the specimens. Still the species had no common name until the MSU entomologists
and their colleagues came up with emerald ash borer. By the time Michigan identified the invader ash trees across southeast Michigan were dead
We think emerald ash borers probably arrived from China where they attack only very stressed or dying ash trees.
Because of that they are considered not an important pest in China. The Asian ash species have evolved with the beetles so healthy trees there are resistant to them.
In North america emerald ash borers would still prefer to attack stressed trees but it will do fine on healthy trees too.
The latest news is featured at www. emeraldashborer. info which is housed at MSU. The site features current research which is exploring improved methods to detect new populations as well as identifying natural enemies of emerald ash borers imported from China that may become effective biocontrol agents.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Michigan State university. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
#Scientists link Africanized honeybees changing roles throughout their lives to brain chemistryscientists have been linking an increasing range of behaviors
and inclinations from monogamy to addiction to animals'including humans'underlying biology. To that growing list they're adding division of labor--at least in killer bees.
A report published in ACS'Journal of Proteome Research presents new data that link the amounts of certain neuropeptides in these notorious bees'brains with their jobs inside and outside the hive.
Mario Sergio Palma and colleagues explain that dividing tasks among individuals in a group is a key development in social behavior among Hymenoptera insects
which include bees ants sawflies and wasps. One of the starkest examples of this division of labor is the development of castes
which through nutrition and hormones results in long-lived queens that lay all the thousands of eggs in a colony
and barren workers that forage for food and protect the hive. Bee researchers had observed already that honeybees including Africanized Apis mellifera better known as killer bees divide tasks by age.
As workers get older their roles change from nursing and cleaning the hive to guarding and foraging.
Palma's team wanted to see whether peptides in the brain were associated with the bees'shifting duties.
They found that the amounts of two substances varied by time and location in the brains of the honeybees in a way that mirrored the timing of their changing roles.
Thus these neuropeptides appear to have some functions in the honeybee brain that are specifically related to the age-related division of labor the scientists conclude.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by American Chemical Society. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
In much of the Great plains too little precipitation falls to replace that needed by humans plants and animals.
and illnesses transmitted by food water and disease carriers such as mosquitoes and ticks. Some of these health impacts are already underway in the United states. Climate change will absent other changes amplify some of the existing health threats the Nation now faces.
Events such as droughts floods wildfires and pest outbreaks associated with climate change (for example bark beetles in the West) are already disrupting ecosystems.
and draw a host of butterflies birds and other wildlife that depend on these plants for survival.
and is loved by Hummingbirds. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Wake Forest University.
Simple and elegant mechanism regulates relationships between insects and bacteriasymbiosis is the process that occurs
In many symbiotic relationships host animals and their microbial symbionts are partners that make up a whole--neither one can function without the other
A study by University of Miami researchers reveals how at the cellular level an animal
The study titled Aphid amino acid transporter regulates glutamine supply to intracellular bacterial symbionts is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS.
The findings show how a simple mechanism allows an insect the pea aphid to regulate the manufacturing of essential nutrients supplied by its symbiotic bacteria called Buchnera aphidicola.
The pea aphid feeds on plant sap. Its diet is deficient in essential nutrients called amino acids.
The aphid can produce some amino acids on its own but the rest it must get from beneficial bacteria that live inside aphid cells.
In turn the symbiotic bacteria can't produce amino acids that the aphid can make so the partners exchange insect-produced amino acids for symbiont-produced amino acids.
That conversion of going from a diet with an inappropriate nutritional profile to an appropriate profile occurs in collaboration between the bacteria
To help answer this question the researchers looked at amino acids that are fundamental to the pea aphid-Buchnera symbiotic function.
which is made in the aphid. Glutamine is important because it's the precursor for all amino acids produced both by the aphid and by the symbiont.
The other amino acid is arginine which is made in Buchnera and it's deficient in the pea aphid's diet.
Glutamine is ferried across a membrane that surrounds the cells where the bacteria lives by an amino acid transporter named Apglnt1.
To study this transport mechanism the researchers used a procedure that uses frog eggs (called oocytes) to manufacture Apglnt1.
and where it is localized in the pea aphid the researchers built a model that describes how the amino acid factory responds to supply and demand.
when there is a buildup of arginine in the pea aphid arginine binds to Apglnt1 and inhibits glutamine uptake.
When aphid demand for essential nutrients is high the transporter imports large amounts of precursor
and the precursor is converted into essential nutrients that are returned to the aphid Price says. Conversely when there is low aphid essential nutrient demand little precursor is imported
and the essential nutrient production factory is shut down. A remarkably basic mechanism regulates the biosynthesis of symbiont-produced arginine in response to the needs of the pea aphid.
But the model goes further than that. Since Apglnt1 localizes to the membrane of aphid cells where the bacteria resides
and because of other features peculiar to aphid metabolism transporter Apglnt1 not only regulates arginine biosynthesis but all amino acid biosynthesis Wilson said.
The system is simple and elegant. Thus amino acid transporters play a key role in the evolutionary success of these insects.
But an important question remains: How generalizable is this regulatory mechanism across symbiotic systems? Wilson's lab may find the answer by looking at other sap-feeding insects with intracellular bacteria based on an understanding that emerged from another study from her lab. The study titled Dynamic recruitment of amino acid transporters to the insect
-symbiont interface is published in the journal of Molecular Ecology. That study found that the presence of amino acid transporters is expanded significantly in some sap-feeding insects relative to non sap-feeding insects.
Further these expansions result from large-scale gene duplications that took place independently in different sap-eating insects.
Gene duplication is a process that occurs when part of an organism's genetic material is replicated.
Given the extensive gene duplication of the amino acid transporter gene families that took place multiple times independently in sap-feeding insects it makes sense that gene duplication might be important for recruiting amino acid transporters to mediate
amino acid exchange between these insects and their symbionts said Rebecca P. Duncan doctoral student in the Department of biology at UM and first author of the study.
The sap-eating insects with expanded amino acid transporters come from a common ancestor. However given that the genes expanded independently in each insect sap-feeding insects likely evolved their relationships with their symbionts separately as opposed to in their common ancestor.
Hence Wilson's lab can test if their model is broadly applicable by examining the mechanism of symbiotic regulation in the other sap-feeding insects used in this study.
The findings of these studies show that symbiotic relationships have the power to shape animal evolution at the genetic level.
#Is self-fumigation for the birds? Save threatened species by giving them treated cotton for nestswhen University of Utah biologists set out cotton balls treated with a mild pesticide wild finches in the Galapagos islands used the cotton to help build their nests killing parasitic
fly maggots to protect baby birds. The researchers say the self-fumigation method may help endangered birds and even some mammals.
We are trying to help birds help themselves says biology professor Dale Clayton senior author of a study outlining the new technique.
The findings were published online May 5 2014 in the journal Current Biology. Self-fumigation is important
because there currently are no other methods to control this parasite bloodsucking maggots of the nest fly Philornis downsi says University of Utah biology doctoral student Sarah Knutie the study's first author.
Clayton says the parasitic nest fly may have invaded Ecuador's Galapagos islands via ships and boats from the mainland at an unknown time and showed up in large numbers in the 1990s.
So the birds have no history with these flies which is why they are sitting ducks.
From the perspective of the birds these things are from Mars. Knutie says the flies now infest all land birds there including most of the 14 species of Darwin's finches two
of which are endangered: fewer than 100 mangrove finches remain on Isabela Island and only about 1620 medium tree finches exist all on Floreana Island.
Nest flies have been implicated in population declines of Darwin's finches including the two endangered species. Clayton says the pesticide--permethrin--is safe for the birds:
It might kill a few other insects in the nest. This is the same stuff in head-lice shampoo you put on your kid.
Permethrin is safe. No toxicologist is going to argue with that. The more interesting question is whether the flies will evolve resistance as human head lice have done.
Clayton believes that will not happen if treated cotton is placed only in the habitats of endangered finches not others.
Knutie and Clayton conducted the study with University of Utah doctoral students Sabrina Mcnew and Andrew Bartlow and with Daniela Vargas now of the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain.
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation the University of Utah and a crowd-funding campaign.
and Clayton say their method might help the endangered mangrove finches with only 60 cotton dispensers needed to cover the less than half a square mile inhabited by the birds on Isabela Island.
if mangrove finches will collect cotton balls from dispensers. There are other species of birds that are hurt by parasites
and so if the birds can be encouraged to incorporate fumigated cotton into their nests then they may be able to lessen the effects of the parasites Knutie says.
Examples: Hawaiian honeycreepers infested with feather lice birds in Puerto rico afflicted by Philornis flies and the endangered Florida scrub jay parasitized by fleas.
The same method might be used for the black-tailed prairie dog--removed from the endangered species list
but still declining on the Great plains and often infected by fleas with plague bacteria Knutie says.
Permethrin has been sprayed in burrows but that is labor-intensive so it might be used on vegetation the animals drag into their burrows.
Knutie says permethrin-treated cotton has been used in the Northeast to get mice to incorporate it in their nests to kill Lyme disease-carrying ticks.
Results weren't clear. Finches Nipping at a Clotheslinethe new study was done in the Galapagos islands where the diversity of finches helped inspire Charles darwin's theory of evolution after he visited in the 1830s.
Knutie got the idea for the new study four years ago at her dorm in the Galapagos
when she noticed Darwin's finches were coming to my laundry line grabbing frayed fibers from the line and taking it away presumably back to their nests she recalls.
The birds also collect toilet paper string and fibers from towels. Parasitic nest flies lay their eggs in finch nests
which have shaped dome roofs of woven plant fibers. When the eggs hatch they become larva or maggots
which feed on the blood of nestlings and on mother finches brooding their eggs and nestlings.
Past studies found that in some years maggots kill all the nestlings in nests they parasitize
but spraying nests with 1 percent permethrin solution eradicates the maggots. So Knutie wondered if finches could be encouraged to pick up treated cotton to fumigate their own nests located in tree cacti and acacia trees.
She ran her study during January-April 2013 at a site named El Garrapatero on the Galapagos'Santa cruz Island.
The biologists built wire-mesh dispensers for the cotton. They tried processed cotton balls treated with 1 percent permethrin solution
and as a control unprocessed cotton balls treated with water. Processed and unprocessed cotton balls appear slightly different so researchers could distinguish treated or untreated cotton in nests.
In a preliminary experiment Knutie showed the birds had no preference for collecting treated versus untreated cotton or for processed or unprocessed cotton.
In another preliminary test the researchers showed that the finches which are territorial travel no more than 55 feet from their nests to collect nest-building material.
Collecting Cotton Balls and Killing Maggotsduring the key experiment Knutie and colleagues set up two lines of 15 cotton dispensers--one line on each side of a road
in arid scrub woodland. In each line dispensers alternated between treated and untreated cotton and dispensers were 130 feet apart--more than twice 55 feet making it likely each nesting finch had a favorite dispenser.
That was confirmed: none of the nests were found to have both types of cotton. The researchers searched for active finch nests weekly within 65 feet of each dispenser using a camera on a pole to check each nest
and confirm breeding activity. They found cotton balls were collected by at least four species of Darwin's finches:
the medium ground finch (Geospiza fortis) small ground finch (Geospiza fuliginosa) small tree finch (Camarhynchus parvulus) and vegetarian finch (Platyspiza crassirostris.
In some cases researchers were unsure which species occupied a nest. After birds in a given nest finished breeding (within three weeks) and left the nest the scientists collected the nest dissected it counted the number of parasitic fly maggots
and then weighed and separated all the nest materials including cotton. The Utah biologists found 26 active nests of which 22 (85 percent) contained cotton:
13 nests had treated permethrin cotton nine had untreated cotton and four had no cotton. Regardless of treatment the amount of cotton in nests and the percent of the nest made of cotton didn't vary significantly.
The researchers write that their study found self-fumigation had a significant negative effect on parasites killing at least half the fly maggots.
The 13 nests with treated cotton averaged 15 maggots give or take 10. Nests with untreated cotton averaged 30 maggots give or take eight.
The amount of untreated cotton in a nest was unrelated to the number of maggots; but the more treated cotton the fewer the parasites.
Of eight nests with at least 1 gram of cotton (one 28th of an ounce) seven had no maggots
and one nest had four. If the birds insert a gram or more of treated cotton--about a thimbleful--it kills 100 percent of the fly larvae Clayton says.
A separate follow-up experiment--and earlier studies by others--showed killing the parasites with sprayed permethrin increases baby bird survival.
The researchers did not study survival of offspring in nests with cotton balls because that requires repeatedly climbing to nests
so birds can be weighed and banded which might disrupt the birds from self-fumigating their nests with cotton balls.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of Utah. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference e
#Tomato turf wars: Benign bug beats salmonella; tomato eaters winscientists from the U s. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have identified a benign bacterium that shows promise in blocking Salmonella from colonizing raw tomatoes.
Their research is published ahead of print in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. When applied to Salmonella-contaminated tomato plants in a field study the bacterium known as Paenibacillus alvei significantly reduced the concentration of the pathogen compared to controls.
Outbreaks of Salmonella traced to raw tomatoes have sickened nearly 2000 people in the US from 2000-2010 killing three.
Since the millennium this pathogen has caused 12 multistate outbreaks of food-borne illness--more than one each year.
It was this carnage that provided the impetus for the study according to corresponding author Jie Zheng of the FDA.
The conditions in which tomatoes thrive are also the conditions in which Salmonella thrives says coauthor Eric W. Brown also of FDA
but we knew that if we could block Salmonella from infecting the tomato plant we could reduce its risk of infecting the person who eats the tomato.
The logic behind the work is simple. Many innocuous bacterial species thrive within the tomato-growing environment.
whose kernels stay on the cob instead of falling off. Early agriculturalists also shortened flowering time for crops necessary in shorter growing seasons as in Canada.
High tunnels can provide protection against some insects early freezes hail and other weather events.
#Leaf chewing links insect diversity in modern and ancient forestsobservations of insects and their feeding marks on leaves in modern forests confirm indications from fossil leaf deposits that the diversity of chewing damage relates directly to diversity of the insect
The direct link between richness of leaf-chewing insects and their feeding damage across host plants in two tropical forests validates the underlying assumptions of many paleobiological studies that rely on damage-type richness as a means to infer changes in relative
herbivore richness through time the researchers report in today's (May 2) issue of PLOS ONE.
but rarely include all the insects that actually made the marks. MÃ nica R. Carvalho graduate student Cornell University and Peter Wilf professor of geosciences Penn State and colleagues looked at leaf predation in two tropical forests in Panama to test
for a relationship between the richness of leaf-chewing insects and the leaf damage that the same insects induce.
Using Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute canopy-access cranes and working in the dark at almost 200 feet high in the treetops at new moon during two summers the researchers collected a total of 276 adult
and immature leaf-chewing insects of 156 species . While the largest category of insect was beetles leaf chewers among grasshoppers stick insects
and caterpillars as well as a few ants were collected also. The team also collected fresh leaves of the insects'host plants
and placed the insects in feeding experiment bags with these leaves. They allowed adult insects to feed for two to three days and immature stages to feed until full maturity when possible.
The researchers then classified the damage to the leaves into categories in the same way they catalog fossil leaf-chewing damage.
This is the first attempt to compare leaf-chewing damage inflicted by many kinds of living insects on many kinds of plants throughout a large forest area both to the culprit insects
and to the leaf damage we see in the fossil record said Carvalho. We mounted 276 of the insects with their damaged leaves
and deposited them in the STRI Insect Collection. This collection is known the only vouchered collection of diverse identified insects
and their feeding damage on leaves of identified plant hosts. The number of collected insect species correlated strongly with the number of damage types recorded in canopy leaves of 24 tree
and liana species observed in the feeding experiments. This suggests that the number of types of damage seen in the fossil record is also related to the actual diversity of damage-making insects.
The researchers also compared the modern leaf data to fossil data from Colombia Argentina the Great plains and the Rocky mountains.
They found that the distribution of chewing marks was the same across both modern and ancient settings showing a striking consistency in how insects have divided up their leaf resources since at least the end of the age of dinosaurs.
In the fossil record we frequently find a decrease in damage-type richness during cooling events
and after extinctions and an increase in damage-type richness during warming events and post-extinction recovery said Wilf.
Usually insect body-fossils from these critical time intervals are absent or very rare so we rely on the insect-damaged leaves to tell the story.
These fossil studies have been considered tremendously important for understanding how ecosystems have responded and will respond to climate change and disturbance.
We now have direct observational evidence that the fossil data represent changes in actual insect richness
This work also unlocks the potential to use insect damage as a new way to assess living insect richness as in the fossil record in the context of climate change said Carvalho.
More kinds of chewing marks means more kinds of insects. Other researchers on this project were HÃ ctor Barrios Programa de Maestrã a en Entomologã a Universidad de Panamã¡;
#Crocodile tears please thirsty butterflies and beesthe butterfly (Dryas iulia) and the bee (Centris sp.
On a beautiful December day in 2013 they found the precious nutrients in the tears of a spectacled caiman (Caiman crocodilus) relaxing on the banks of the RÃ o Puerto Viejo in northeastern Costa rica.
while the caiman basked placidly and the insects fluttered about the corners of its eyes.
De la Rosa reported the encounter in a peer-reviewed letter in the May 2014 issue of the Ecological Society of America's journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
Why are these insects tapping into this resource? Though bountiful in the ocean salt is often a rare and valuable resource on land especially for vegetarians.
It is not uncommon to see butterflies sipping mineral-laden water from mud puddles. When minerals are rare in the soil animals sometimes gather salt and other rare minerals and proteins from sweat tears urine and even blood.
De la Rosa had seen butterflies and moths in the Amazon feeding on the tears of turtles and a few caimans.
Tear-drinking lachryphagous behavior in bees had only recently been observed by biologists. He remembered a 2012 report of a solitary bee sipping the tears of a yellow-spotted river turtle in Ecuador's Yasunã National park
. But how common is this behavior? Back at the field station he did a little research.
He was surprised to find more evidence of tear-drinking than he expected in the collective online record of wilderness enthusiasts casual tourists professional photographers and scientists.
A lot of people have recorded butterflies and some bees doing this said de la Rosa. A search of the scientific literature produced a detailed study of bees drinking human tears in Thailand as well as the remembered October 2012 Trails
and Tribulations story about the Ecuadorian bee and the river turtle by Olivier Dangles and JÃ rã'me Casas in ESA's Frontiers.
De la Rosa is a specialist in the biology of non-biting midges and a natural historian with his eyes always open to new discoveries.
Scientists at La Selva have discovered hundreds of species of aquatic insects that are unnamed still and undescribed.
Howler monkeys wake him every morning. I learned I have to carry a camera with me 24/7 because you never know what you're going to find
One day he spied a new species of dragonfly on his way to breakfast. It had emerged from its larval form in the small pool of water caught in the cupped leaves of a bromeliad plant.
Dragonflies don't live on bromeliads. Or do they? Those are the kinds of things that you know you don't plan for them you can't plan for them de la Rosa said.
There was only one known species of dragonfly in the world that lives in bromeliads. Now there will be two.
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