Maurice Leponce, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciencesarmy ants (Eciton Burchelli) in San Lorenzo forest stretch across a gap and permit other members of the colony to walk
Maurice Leponce, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciencesa"blushing phantom butterfly, Cithaerias pireta, rests briefly on a palm leaf in San Lorenzo forest.
Maurice Leponce, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciencesthe male elephant scarab beetle, Megasoma elephas fights for females and food with a formidable horn.
Thomas Martin, Jean-Philippe Sobczak & Hendrik Dietz, TU Munichentomologist J Â rgen Schmidl collects arboreal insects in San Lorenzo forest by fogging trees with biodegradable insecticides.
Emissions profits Airlines that fly to and from Europe may have profited by up to  1. 36  billion (US$1. 83  billion) last year by raising air fares to cover costs
so that the insects are exposed not to the insecticides through pollen and nectar. Dust and plant sap contaminated with the chemicals may also pose a risk to bees,
MON Â 810, an insect-resistant maize (corn; and Amflora, a starchy potato used in the paper industry.
flies and humans. Comb jellies paddle through the sea with iridescent cilia and snare prey with sticky tentacles.
Bumblebees sense electric fields in flowersas they zero in on their sugary reward, foraging bumblebees follow an invisible clue:
electric fields. Although some animals, including sharks, are known to have an electric sense, this is the first time the ability has been documented in insects.
Pollinating insects take in a large number of sensory cues, from colours and fragrances to petal textures and air humidity.
Being able to judge which flowers will provide the most nectar, and which have already been plundered by other pollinators,
helps them to use their energy more efficiently. It has long been known that bumblebees build up a positive electrical charge as they rapidly flap their wings;
when they land on flowers, this charge helps pollen to stick to their hairs. Daniel Robert, a biologist at the University of Bristol, UK, knew that such electrical interactions would temporarily change the electrical status of the flowers
whether bumblebees were picking up on this. Keen to find out, he and a team of colleagues measured the net charges of individuals of Bombus terrestris, a common species of bumblebee,
by using sucrose to lure them into a Faraday pail an electrically shielded bucket that reacts to the charge of anything inside it.
most bumblebees were carrying a positive charge. Next, the team placed the insects into an arena with petunias (Petunia integrifolia)
and measured the flowers'electrical potentials. Sure enough, when the bees landed, the flowers became a little more positively charged.
Finally, the team released bumblebees into an arena with artificial flowers, half of which were carried positively charged and a sucrose reward,
the insects visited rewarding flowers only about half of the time, as they would have by random chance.
"We think bumblebees are using this ability to perceive electrical fields to determine if flowers were visited recently by other bumblebees
and are therefore worth visiting, says Robert."We had no idea that this sense even existed,
this is going to open up a whole new window on insect sensory systems for us to study. Some experts suggest that the study has implications for insects other than bees."
"If you think about it, these discoveries could also apply to hoverflies and moths, says Robert Raguso, a chemical ecologist also at Cornell.
We don t know if they can perceive charge differentials, but they burn a lot of energy while hovering around looking for pollen or nectar.
furry animal scurried through the forest in search of insects. Its unassuming looks gave little hint that its descendants would one day rule the planet.
furry-tailed insect eater that weighed between 6 and 245 grams. It gave birth to blind, hairless young, one at a time.
The Xerces Blue butterfly disappeared with the sand dunes from San francisco in the 1940s as that city swelled.
and others, ranging from synthetic biologist George Church of Harvard Medical school to environmental gadfly Steward Brand of the Long Now Foundation
Scientists, meanwhile, are vigorously debating whether the studies on neonicotinoids and the health of honeybees and bumblebees,
Neonicotinoids, which poison insects by binding to receptors in their nervous systems have been in use since the late 1990s.
protecting them from insect pests. But a growing body of research suggests that sublethal exposure to the pesticides in nectar
return to their hives and reproduce1-6 (see The buzz over bee health). The past year has seen a raft of papers about the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides on bees.
Honeybees in French fields exposed to thiamethoxam show impaired homing back to hives1. And bumblebee colonies exposed to"field-realistic levels of imidacloprid in labs show a decreased growth rate
and an 85%reduction in new queen production, compared with controls2. 21 october 2012:""Field-level exposure of bumblebees to imidacloprid and a non-neonicotinoid insecticide impairs foraging,
increases worker-bee mortality and reduces colony success3. 7 february 2013:""Prolonged exposure to imidacloprid and another insecticide impairs learning and memory in honeybees4.
27 march 2013: Lab study shows that imidacloprid, clothianidin and an organophosphate pesticide block firing of honeybee brain cells, especially when combined5.
March 2013:""No clear consistent relationships seen between neonicotinoid levels and colony mass or production of new queens by bumblebee hives6.
In January, the European Food safety Authority in Parma, Italy, Europe s food-chain risk-assessment body, concluded that three commonly used neonicotinoids clothianidin,
imidacloprid and thiamethoxam should not be used where they might end up in crops that attract bees, such as oilseed rape and maize.
they could play a part by making bees more susceptible to the parasitic mite Varroa destructor and the parasitic fungus Nosema apis,
Conducted by an agency within the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs (DEFRA), it exposed 20 Â bumblebee colonies at three sites to crops grown from untreated,
and harm to the insects. DEFRA also reviewed the body of evidence on neonicotinoids and concluded that,
Lack of water makes plants less capable of fending off pathogens and insects. After the 2003 heatwave, caterpillars devastated Mediterranean oak forests near Montpellier in France.
Researchers have presumed that this triggered a large carbon release but such responses are hard to predict.
Mutant mosquitoes lose lust for human scentmosquitoes that are modified genetically to lack some of their sense of smell cannot tell humans from other animals
and no longer avoid approaching people who are slathered in bug spray. These findings, published online today in Nature1, could help scientists to design insect repellents to combat malaria, dengue and agricultural pests.
Some mosquito species will feed on most animals that they encounter. Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carries dengue and yellow fever,
and Anopheles gambiae, which hosts the malaria parasites, are choosier: they prefer humans.""They love everything about us,
says Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist at The Rockefeller University in New york, who led the latest study."
Mosquitoes have specialized sensing systems for detecting carbon dioxide and body heat, but body odour is the only one of these features that distinguishes humans from other warm-blooded animals.
Leslie Vosshall tells Ewen Callaway what makes humans so yummy for mosquitoes. Vosshall s team genetically engineered A. aegypti mosquitoes to lack the gene orco,
which makes a protein that helps build the receptor molecules that sense many smells. A series of experiments showed that without the Orco protein
the mosquitoes struggled to distinguish the smell of honey from that of glycerol (an odourless liquid of similar consistency),
"It s sort of like a game show where the mosquitoes are released into a box and we ask them to choose door number one,
The mutant mosquitoes that did pick the scent of the human arm, however, did not hesitate to approach it.
The engineered mosquitoes were also unable to smell the insect repellent DEET (N N-diethyl-meta-toluamide) from a distance.
A normal mosquito would avoid DEET, but the mutants were shown to land on a human arm slathered in the repellent.
suggesting that DEET can deter mosquitoes not just via its smell but also via direct contact.
which other sensations repel mosquitoes.""It s unbelievable to me that people have been spraying DEET on skin for upwards of 60 years.
because mosquitoes without the gene are attracted still to humans. A more probable scenario is that DEET jams a mosquito s sensory system
he says.""We all know being in a room with too much sensory stimulation is pretty aversive.
Male mosquitoes genetically engineered to produce unviable offspring have shown promise in field trials in reducing populations of A. aegypti.
But Vosshall and Zwiebel dismiss the idea of releasing mosquitoes that cannot discriminate between humans and other animals.
whether it scrambles insects'sense of smell. Almost all insects have orco so a chemical that targets the gene could help to keep pests away from economically important crops."
"We re not looking to kill these insects, per se, we just want them to feed on something else,
says Zwiebel
Long-lived insects raise prime riddledrivers who end up behind John Cooley this week will quickly lose their patience.
Cruising around the eastern United states with his car window open, he slows down or stops every few hundred metres,
Since last week, Cooley, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, has been on the road mapping populations of periodical cicadas (Magicicada.
These loud, red-eyed insects have spent the past 17 Â years maturing underground, only to emerge this month by the billions for a few weeks of singing
Like a handful of other cicada researchers on the prowl from North carolina to New york, Cooley knows that he has to work quickly."
"Time is the real enemy here, for both the cicadas and the researchers, he says."
The insect genus with the longest known life cycles, Magicicada has confounded scientists for centuries. In 1665, the first volume of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society included a report from New england concerning"swarms of strange insects,
and the mischiefs done by them. Charles darwin also puzzled over them. Even now, entomologists are trying to understand how the insects peculiar life cycles evolved,
how they count the years underground and how they synchronize their schedules.""They are one of the big ecological mysteries out there,
Of the thousands of cicada species known around the world, only the seven Magicicada species,
At the southern end of their range, Magicicada populations have split into three mixed-species broods that emerge every 13 Â years.
Brood II cicadas have grown through five larval stages underground, where they survived by sucking fluids from tree roots.
With the warm weather this month, the nymphs have been crawling out of the ground before moulting for one last time and taking wing.
the cicadas can chorus at more than 95 decibels loud enough to harm human hearing as the males woo the females.
The new generations of nymphs will fall to the ground, burrow into the soil and remain there until 2030.
Biologists generally agree that the giant synchronized emergence of periodical cicadas overwhelms potential predators, allowing some of the relatively defenceless insects to reproduce.
And some researchers have proposed that the cicadas have evolved life cycles around prime numbers of years because that arrangement limits the chances that predators will synchronize with the cicadas.
But these ideas do not address why the generations specifically last for 13 Â or 17 Â years.
Koenig suggests that the answer may involve interactions with birds. He and Andrew Liebhold of the US Forest Service in Morgantown, West virginia, analysed 45 years of data from the North american Breeding Bird Survey (W. D. Koenig and A m. Liebhold Am.
which periodical cicadas emerge. Birds feed on cicadas, so Koenig expected to find the opposite pattern. He proposes that the masses of cicadas trigger long-term changes in the forest that end up causing bird populations to crash after 13 or 17 Â years.
The mechanism remains a mystery, but Koenig notes that one factor could be the flood of dead cicadas,
whose bodies are 10%nitrogen. The die off sends a pulse of fertilizer into the forest that temporarily enhances plant growth
but could later lead to unfavourable conditions for birds.""It s a pretty weird hypothesis, he admits.
Ron Edmonds/AP Photoa cicada moults for the last time before taking wing. To synchronize their emergence, the nymphs must somehow keep track of how long they have been underground.
Gene Kritsky, an entomologist at the College of Mount St joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio, says that nymphs seem to count the number of times that trees set their leaves in the spring;
in 2007, some Brood XIV cicadas emerged a year early, following a strong winter thaw during which trees produced leaves,
then dropped them and grew new ones in the subsequent spring. But no one knows how cicadas remember the number of years
since they last emerged. Researchers are making more progress in probing the biological mechanisms that allow cicadas to switch their life cycles.
In an analysis of DNA markers published this year (T.  Sota et  al.
2013), a team including Cooley developed an evolutionary tree for Magicicada and found that the major species groups had repeatedly split into 13-year and 17-year cohorts.
plans to follow up those results with several genetic studies, including sequencing the RNA transcripts of genes that are active at different stages in the cicada life cycle.
She is interested particularly in probing the occasional tendency of periodical cicadas to emerge 4 Â years early or late.
Kritsky documented thousands of cicadas appearing last week in a spot where he saw stragglers in 2000,
four years before the city was inundated with the expected 17-year cicadas of Brood X. The arrival of cicadas in the same place this year might mean that an environmental change such as global warming is causing them to emerge early,
The long generations of the periodical cicadas makes studying them difficult, he says.""You would think we d have a lot of answers
Pesticide use has reduced sharply the regional biodiversity of stream invertebrates, such as mayflies and dragonflies, in Europe and Australia, finds a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
The European Food safety Authority in Parma, Italy, concluded in May that maize (corn) seeds treated with fipronil pose a high acute risk to honeybees. ips trial approved On 19 july, Japan s health minister,
which is modified to produce a protein called Bt that is harmful to insect pests, is one of only two GM CROPS approved for cultivation in the EU. The other is a high-starch GM potato called Amflora that is intended for industrial applications such as paper production.
Losing a single pollinator species harms plantsremoving even a single bee species from an ecosystem has serious effects on plant reproduction,
yet simulations have predicted that the insects decreasing numbers will not have a major effect on plant reproduction until most pollinating species are gone3.
Wielding his butterfly net, ecologist Berry Brosi of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, set out to test these models in the field with his colleague Heather Briggs from the University of California,
They first monitored the plots in their natural state, identifying the most abundant species of bumblebee (of the Genus bombus) in each.
The researchers counted how many different species of plant the bumblebees visited, studying 736 individual insects in total.
They also carefully caught bees as they were pollinating the flowering plant Delphinium barbeyi (a type of larkspur) and anaesthetised them
Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, Brosi and Briggs find that after they removed the dominating bumblebee species from a given plot,
Brosi's study measured seed production only in larkspur a plant that is pollinated by several species of bumblebee.
as well as to pollinators other than bees. Brosi says that his work adds weight to the argument that society should be more active in protecting pollinators.
In the United states""it seems to me like a pesticide is safe until proven otherwise,
But given the sensitivity of plants to the removal of pollinators"it might be time to rethink those sorts of policies
But in the seventeenth century, the Danish mathematician Erasmus Bartholin suggested that the insects need no such forethought.
The team interrupted honeybees making a comb by smoking them out of the hive and found that the most recently built cells have a circular shape,
The authors say that the worker bees that make the comb knead and heat the wax with their bodies until it reaches about 45 oc warm enough to flow like a viscous liquid.
the comb cells of the Italian honeybee (Apis mellifera Ligustica) are circular (top), but after two days they already look more hexagonal (bottom).
the temperature of the hive will always be close to the melting point, so the wax will be close to being fluid.
the insects strengthen the walls over time by adding other materials to it, creating a kind of composite
The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the branch of the agriculture department responsible for overseeing GM CROPS,
In 2011, APHIS regulators announced that a herbicide-tolerant Kentucky bluegrass would not fall under their purview,
and was just a test case to see how APHIS would respond. That is not the case for other groups that have been told that their GM products would not be regulated.
Sally  Mackenzie, a plant biologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, contacted APHIS about the high-yield offspring of a transgenic sorghum grass plant
In 2012, APHIS regulators invited Mackenzie to the organization s headquarters in Riverdale, Maryland, and questioned her about this hypothesis. APHIS eventually notified her that it would not regulate her plants a decision that Mackenzie says has accelerated her research
and may allow her to launch a company to develop her grass variety. Agricultural giants Monsanto, based in St  Louis, Missouri,
Have you been through APHIS? says Mackenzie. Other companies are gauging their prospects with different DNA-modification tools,
In 2010, APHIS told Dow Agrosciences of Indianapolis, Indiana, that it would not regulate a herbicide-tolerant maize (corn) made using zinc-finger nucleases.
Massachusetts, says that he would rather be regulated by APHIS to earn the public s trust.
In April 2012, APHIS told him that the agency would regulate his variety in spite of the fact that the genes he introduced came from other apples.
despite concerns about droughts, wildfires and bark beetles surging as the world warms. Ecosystem productivity is rising at high latitudes, with a roughly 50%increase in the amount of carbon cycling through northern landscapes since the 1950s,
"It s not just multi-bug, multi-drug, he says, "but multi-country. Scotland imports most of its red meat,
not only offer hope to farmers battling the beetle, but also provide an incentive to protect wildlife habitat:
The insect is invulnerable to most pesticides, and can cost farmers up to 75%of their crop.
They found that avian predators did indeed pick off a lot of beetles: in the rainy season peak time for beetle activity borer infestation almost doubled
birds reduce the beetles dirty Work on one farm, hungry birds warded off beetles from coffee beans worth around 4%of the total value of the annual crop.
That may not sound like much, says Karp, but"in farming, every little bit helps, especially because often you re barely scraping by
the rate of shift varied significantly for different groups and among individual species. Fungi, beetles, true bugs, mites,
butterflies and moths showed clear movements to higher latitudes, whereas viruses and nematode worms shifted to lower latitudes.
Pesticide makes invading ants suicidally aggressiveneonicotinoid insecticides have developed a bad reputation for their unintended and potentially harmful effects on pollinating insects such as bees.
A study in New zealand now shows that the chemical can also change how native and invasive ants interact.
New zealand is facing an invasion of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile), which compete with native southern ants (Monomorium antarcticum).
The insects often meet in urban or agricultural areas, where neonicotinoids are in use. So ecologist Rafael Barbieri, a graduate student in the lab of Philip Lester at Victoria University of Wellington, wondered
whether the behavioural changes that have been associated with sublethal neonicotinoid exposure in other insects affect how the two species interact."
"Any changes in behaviour could potentially affect the structure of the entire community, he says.
As the team describes in Proceedings of the Royal Society B1, Barbieri exposed the ants to extremely low doses of a common neonicotinoid
and examined how the insecticide affected each species behaviour. He did not observe an effect on the foraging behaviour or survivability of either species in isolation,
although they did cut the brood size of the invasive Argentine ant in half. But it was
When the southern ant was exposed to the potent neurotoxins it became much less aggressive towards the invader.
This increased the survival odds of The argentine ant, and could help it to spread. However, when invasive ants were exposed to the insecticides,
they became much more aggressive towards unexposed Southern ants so aggressive, in fact, that they risked their own lives to attack.
As a result, unexposed natives were able to completely eradicate their exposed rivals. The mixed results make it difficult to predict whether,
and how, neonicotinoids will exacerbate the invasion of Argentine ants, says Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland,
But it is another example of how low levels of these insecticides can change behaviour in many different kinds of insects."
"There s no doubt that neonicotinoids are fantastic to control insect pests, says Barbieri.""But we should be more careful in the way we use them in nature
A case in point is the whitefly Bemisia tabaci, an insect that feeds on plant vascular tissue called phloem.
Researchers have managed now to halt the whitefly s march. Strategies such as planting crop varieties that are resistant to the pest,
Another invader that has been brought under control is the red turpentine beetle (Dendroctonus valens. In North america, the beetle mainly attacks dead or ailing trees.
But the beetles, which were introduced to China in the 1980s, have wiped out more than 10 Â million pine trees in northern provinces since 1999.
A study led by Sun Jianghua, an entomologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Zoology in Beijing, found that the interaction between the beetles
and their symbiotic fungus Leptographium procerum is key to their personality change in China (J.  Sun et  al.
says Sun. One of these induces trees to release large amounts of the compound 3-carene a strong attractant to the beetles that is not released in response to the north American fungal variant.
The finding has led to a series of successful projects to trap beetles using 3-carene.
Sun s findings raise the possibility of a potential reinvasion of the United states by the red turpentine beetle
She has been studying the invasion of the harlequin ladybird (Harmonia axyridis) in Europe and, by working with Chinese researchers
is now trying to understand the insect s behaviour and natural enemies in the hope of developing effective control measures.
The idea of introducing aphid alarm pheromones into wheat to protect it against aphid attack that comes out of that group.
The spatial ecologists have done remarkable work on monitoring the movement of a whole range of insects using horizontal and vertical radar to follow migration paths.
we know almost nothing about insect migration. Jason Chapman s group has demonstrated there s a lot more to insect migration than simply following the wind.
The other area that is outstanding is the lipid-biochemistry work of Johnathan Napier. His group has done fantastic fundamental work in plant lipid biochemistry.
In Asia, pine-wood nematodes spread with the help of Japanese pine sawyer beetles (in the Monochamus genus). The worms enter the respiratory system of hatching beetle pupae in the trunks of diseased trees
and then hitchhike in the beetles when they move to healthy trees. As the young beetles feed, the nematodes leave through the insects'mouths.
Once infected trees often die within a year and their hollow trunks provide an ideal place for mature beetles to mate
and lay eggs in. The pests seem to prefer certain pine forests over others, but the reason has not been clear."
says Sun. Â To examine the fungi s role in the relationship, the team fed nematodes and beetles with different types of fungus in a Petri dish.
"The fungus also allowed the beetles to survive better and grow faster, says Sun. The researchers found that Sporothrix sp. 1 also increased the trees'production of diacetone alcohol,
which increases growth and reproduction in the beetles and nematodes. The key now, says Mota,
although poisonous to livestock, were resistant to attack by weevils. This spawned a niche industry that develops
many research teams have gathered evidence that plant-munching insects and other predators keep populations of plant species in check.
mountain pine beetles and blister rust fungus once thwarted by the cold, dry climate have devastated the trees,
For example, honeybees (Apis mellifera) and gray jays (Perisoreus canadensis) 2 have been seen to violate IIA, and so have hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus) 3."On witnessing such behaviour in the past,
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