#Ants rise with temperaturewarm nights might be more important than hot days in determining how species respond to climate change.
The study shows that the lowest---not the highest--temperatures are critical in determining the migration of warmth-loving ants Aphaenogaster rudis to higher elevations.
As they migrate A. rudis--a reddish ant with light-colored legs--displace Aphaenogaster picea a dark ant with dark legs.
Aphaenogaster ants are the dominant woodland seed dispersers in eastern forests. So it's possible that the displacement of A. picea may affect the spread of seeds produced by early spring ephemerals said Warren. By comparing data collected in 1974 to current data Warren
To obtain that evidence Warren's team collected a total of 755 ants from 191 colonies.
In the lab researchers subjected the ants to thermal tolerance tests. Loss of righting response was used to indicate intolerance to low and high temperatures.
#New insights on invasive fly threatening US fruit cropshumans aren't the only species with a sweet tooth.
Research from North carolina State university shows that the invasive spotted-wing vinegar fly (Drosophila suzukii) also prefers sweet soft fruit--giving us new insight into a species that has spread across the United states over the past four years
The female flies use serrated blades on the tip of their abdomens to cut through the skin of ripe fruit
when detecting the presence of a predator near their hive which in turn causes an attack response to the possible predator.
Evasive alarm pheromones provoke an escape response in insects that visit a particular flower and until now we were not sure of the role that these pheromones played in social bees.
San francisco. In the morning each bee goes looking individually for a sugar source then comes back to the hive
and does a dance in front of the other bees describing the location of what it's found which helps the hive decide collectively where the best source is said senior scientist Matthew Krummel Phd a UCSF professor of pathology.
and more emphasis on neatness blocking cracks where insects can enter and other so-called integrated pest management (IPM) measures scientists have concluded.
but it seems honeybees also get their buzz from drinking flower nectar containing caffeine. Publishing in Science researchers have shown that caffeine improves a honeybee's memory
and could help the plant recruit more bees to spread its pollen. In tests honeybees feeding on a sugar solution containing caffeine
which occurs naturally in the nectar of coffee and citrus flowers were three times more likely to remember a flower's scent than those feeding on just sugar.
Study leader Dr Geraldine Wright Reader in Neuroethology at Newcastle University explained that the effect of caffeine benefits both the honeybee and the plant:
So caffeine in nectar is likely to improve the bee's foraging prowess while providing the plant with a more faithful pollinator.
and tastes bitter to many insects including bees so we were surprised to find it in the nectar.
Just as black coffee has a strong bitter taste to us high concentrations of caffeine are repellent to honeybees.
Although human and honeybee brains obviously have lots of differences when you look at the level of cells proteins
Thus we can use the honeybee to investigate how caffeine affects our own brains and behaviours.
This project was funded in part by the Insect Pollinators Initiative which supports projects aimed at researching the causes
and consequences of threats to insect pollinators and to inform the development of appropriate mitigation strategies.
and agriculture since bees are essential pollinators for many crops and wild flowering species. If declines are allowed to continue there is a risk to our natural biodiversity and on some crop production.
Understanding a honeybee's habits and preferences could help find ways to reinvigorate the species to protect our farming industry and countryside.
Bats make up a large component of mammalian diversity in forest ecosystems where they play an important role as insect predators.
The researchers conducted surveys in 2003 using high-frequency microphones to record the ultrasonic echolocation pulses that bats use to hunt insects.
Fire may provide a pulse of insects immediately after the fire and create roosting habitat later on as snags decay
and insect resistance but it can stand in the way of enzymes that want to get at the sugars locked up in the carbohydrates.
since the phenomenon was discovered in fruit flies 50 years ago. A new study a highlight in the March issue of the journal Genetics provides the latest plot twist.
When male flies make their sperm the SD gene (call it A) manages to rig meiosis--the specialized cell division that makes sex cells
Humans flies all of us have been attacked for millennia by selfish genetic elements that want to make as many copies as possible Reenan said.
Sometimes as in SD flies there are no apparent ill effects but when the selfish genes come in the form of viruses
and the important pollinator services they provide. The results are published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Bees are considered the most important pollinators because of their efficiency specificity and ubiquity. However despite concerns about pollinator declines long-term data on the status of bee species are scarce.
In the new study the researchers used new web-based software to compile 30000 museum specimen records representing 438 bee species. A novel aspect of this study was the use of collaborative
While the study found that IBDS was the greatest risk factor a close runner-up was the occurrence of a so-called queen event.
Honey bee colonies have only one queen. When a colony perceives something wrong with its queen the workers eliminate that queen
and try to replace her. This process is not always smooth or successful. The occurrence of a queen event had a risk factor of 3. 1. This is the first time anyone has done an epidemiological study to repeatedly evaluate the health of the same commercial honey bee colonies over the course of a season Tarpy says.
It shows that IBDS is a significant problem that we don't understand very well. It also highlights that we need to learn more about what causes colonies to reject their queens.
These are areas we are actively researching. Hopefully this will give us insights into other health problems including colony collapse disorder.
The paper Idiopathic brood disease syndrome and queen events as precursors of colony mortality in migratory beekeeping operations in the eastern United states is published in the February issue of Preventive Veterinary medicine.
and bean--most species have specialized highly butterfly-shaped flowers with bilateral symmetry fused stamens and strongly differentiated standard wing
and habitat loss on plant-pollinator networksare plant-pollinator networks holding together as the insects and plants in the network are jostled by climate change and habitat loss?
or insects first appeared and almost none follow both plants and insects. Which is why biologist Tiffany Knight
and her then postdoctoral research associate Laura Burkle were delighted to discover meticulous data on a plant-pollinator network recorded by Illinois naturalist Charles Robertson between 1887 and 1916.
Recollecting 26 spring-blooming flowers from Robertson's network Knight Phd professor of biology at Washington University
Half the bee species associated with these flowers in Robertson's lifetime had disappeared some pollinators were active before their plants had bloomed plants weren't visited as often
The bees still have food plants are still getting pollinator service. But the service has declined the network's structure is weaker
The study the first to look at human disruption of plant-pollinator networks through the lens of historical data appears in the Feb 28th online edition of Science.
Robertson's astonishing legacya professor of biology and Greek at Blackburn College in Carlinville Illinois Charles Robertson collected flower-visiting insects near Carlinville between 1887 and 1916.
Over 20 years Robertson recorded visits from 1429 pollinators (including flies beetles and butterflies as well as bees) to 456 plant species. He identified
and described several hundred insects previously unknown to science. So respected is he among entomologists that roughly 20 additional species have been named for him.
Robertson's meticulous database is probably the oldest of its type for flower-visiting insects.
Before Robertson said co-author John Marlin Phd a research affiliate at the University of Illinois's Prairie Research Institute who had recollected part of Robertson's network in the 1970s almost all insect collecting was done independently of the plant.
Robertson was one of the first to record the insect the plant it was collected on to the extent possible
what the insect was doing and other factors which led to an explosion of information on insect-plant relationships.
Burkle said she particularly enjoyed the sleuthing needed to figure out Robertson's methods so that they could replicate them.
It was like solving a mystery she said trying to deduce what he had done from old ledgers specimen
i. d. tags and his privately published book Flowers and Insects. How Robertson's network is studied doingrobertson it all Knight said.
and the insects flew for 22.5 fewer days. Because everything was compressed more there was less overlap and less time for successful pollination.
All through high school I studied bees and ants he said and when I came to college the Illinois Natural history Survey hired
me to help collect insects around the state. In my senior year I was asked to collect bees at Carlinville to try to duplicate as much as possible Robertson's efforts.
We can't just kick these plant-pollinator networks forever and expect them to keep functioning Knight said.
#Loss of wild insects hurts crops around the worldresearchers studying data from 600 fields in 20 countries have found that managed honey bees are not as successful at pollinating crops as wild insects primarily wild bees suggesting the continuing
loss of wild insects in many agricultural landscapes has negative consequences for crop harvests. The study which prompts an urgent call to maintain
and manage pollinator diversity for long-term agricultural production is published today in the journal Science. The 50 international researchers including Lawrence Harder professor in the Department of Biological sciences in the Faculty of science at the University of Calgary analysed data from 41 crop systems around the world including fruits seeds nuts
and coffee to examine the consequences of having abundant wild pollinators for crop pollination. Our study demonstrates that production of many fruit
but that increased service by wild insects would help. Flowers of most crops need to receive pollen before making seeds
and fruits a process that is enhanced by insects that visit flowers. These pollinators including bees flies butterflies
and beetles usually live in natural or semi-natural habitats such as the edges of forests hedgerows or grasslands.
As these habitats are lost primarily owing to conversion to agriculture the abundance and diversity of pollinators decline and crops receive fewer visits from wild insects.
The study found that the proportion of flowers producing fruits was considerably lower in sites with fewer wild insects visiting crop flowers.
Therefore the reduction of wild insects in agricultural landscapes will likely impact both our natural heritage and agricultural harvest.
Paradoxically most common approaches to increase agricultural efficiency such as cultivation of all available land and the use of pesticides reduce the abundance
and variety of wild insects that could increase production of these crops says Harder. Our study highlights the benefits of considering this paradox in designing
and wild insects will enhance global yields of animal-pollinated crops and promote long-term agricultural production.
or restoration of natural or semi-natural areas within croplands promotion of a variety of land use addition of diverse floral and nesting resources and more prudent use of insecticides that can kill pollinators.
#Wasp transcriptome creates a buzznew research delivers a sting in the tail for queen wasps.
--or transcriptome--of primitively eusocial wasps to identify the part of the genome that makes you a queen or a worker.
Their work published in Biomed Central's open access journal Genome Biology shows that workers have a more active transcriptome than queens.
This suggests that in these simple societies workers may be the'jack-of-all-trades'in the colony--transcriptionally speaking--leaving the queen with a somewhat restricted repertoire.
Studying primitively eusocial species--like these wasps--can tell us about how sociality evolves. Seirian Sumner and colleagues sequenced transcriptomes from the eusocial tropical paper wasps--Polistes canadensis.
All social species ultimately evolved from a solitary ancestor--in this case a solitary wasp who lays the eggs and feeds the brood.
But how does this ancestral solitary phenotype split to produce specialised reproducers (queens) and brood carers (workers) when a species becomes social?
This paper gives a first insight into the secret lives of social insects. It shows that workers retain a highly active transcriptome possibly expressing many of the ancestral genes that are required for our solitary wasp to be successful on her own.
Conversely queens appear to shut down a lot of their genes presumably in order to be really good reproducers. Longstanding analyses based on the fossil record holds ants and wasps in a clade known as Vespoidea with bees as a sister group.
The team reassess the relationships between the subfamilies of bees wasps and ants and suggest that wasps are part of a separate clade from ants
and bees though further genome sequences and comparative data will help to resolve this controversy The dataset offers a first chance to analyse subfamily relationships across large numbers of genes
though further work is required before the term Vespoidia could be dropped or reclassified. Sumner says:''This finding would have important general implications for our understanding of eusociality as it would suggest that bees
and ants shared an aculeate wasp-like ancestor that ants are wingless wasps and that bees are lost wasps that predacious behaviours.'
'Their work suggests that novel genes play a much more important role in social behaviour than we previously thought.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Biomed Central Limited. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference e
#Maize in diets of people in coastal Peru dates to 5, 000 years agofor decades archaeologists have struggled with understanding the emergence of a distinct South american civilization during the Late Archaic period (3000-1800
Bumblebees find and distinguish electric signals from flowersflowers'methods of communicating are sophisticated at least as as any devised by an advertising agency according to a new study published Feb 21 in Science Express by researchers from the University of Bristol.
The research shows for the first time that pollinators such as bumblebees are able to find and distinguish electric signals given out by flowers.
and enticing fragrances to attract their pollinators. Researchers at Bristol's School of Biological sciences led by Professor Daniel Robert found that flowers also have their equivalent of a neon sign--patterns of electrical signals that can communicate information to the insect pollinator.
These electrical signals can work in concert with the flower's other attractive signals and enhance floral advertising Power plants are charged usually negatively
To their surprise the researchers discovered that bumblebees can detect and distinguish between different floral electric fields.
although the researchers speculate that hairy bumblebees bristle up under the electrostatic force just like one's hair in front of an old television screen.
The discovery of such electric detection has opened up a whole new understanding of insect perception and flower communication.
This novel communication channel reveals how flowers can potentially inform their pollinators about the honest status of their precious nectar and pollen reserves.
Their observation of how patterns of pigmentation on flower petals influence bumblebees'behavior suggests that color veins give clues to the location of the nectar.
The authors looked at the ways in which these color veins influence bumblebee foraging behavior.
While this loss of control probably has a high evolutionary cost it allows the tree to survive the insect-plant war.
which was untouched by insects when the rest of the tree was defoliated completely. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Biomed Central Limited.
These effects promote the growth of good bugs while keeping bad bugs at bay. A University of Colorado Cancer Center review published in this month's issue of the journal Current Opinion in Gastroenterology shows that resistant starch also helps the body resist colorectal cancer through mechanisms including killing pre-cancerous cells
The beetles don't carry disease but their larvae feed on the ash trees'sap effectively killing the trees by depriving trees of their nourishment.
Baker and a postdoctoral fellow in his lab Michael J. Domingue were using dead female EABS for bait to trap the male beetles.
Baker then learned that Lakhtakia was able to replicate certain biological materials such as fly eyes and butterfly wings.
The two researchers working with a graduate student in Lakhtakia's lab Drew P. Pulsifer created a mold of the top of the female beetle's body.
The decoy beetle is made by a process of layering polymers with different refractive indexes to create the desired iridescence
and create a color similar to the beetle's own iridescent green. The researchers'findings are scheduled to be published in the April issue of the Journal of Bionic Engineering.
They also ran a pilot test in Hungary with a related beetle pest that bores into oak trees.
and insects to move the viruses around. In contrast perennial plants in nature grow slower
#New insect: Spectacular forcepfly species discovered for the first time in South Americaforcepflies are usually known as earwigflies because the males have a large genital forceps that resembles the cerci of earwigs.
A new species of forcepfly Meropeidae (Mecoptera) from Brazil was described representing only the 3rd extant species described in this family
The advance toward broadening applicability of the so-called sterile insect technique (SIT) appears in the journal ACS Synthetic biology.
Luke Alphey and colleagues explain that the Lepidoptera a large family of insects with a caterpillar stage cause widespread damage worldwide to cotton;
Farmers usually battle these pests with traditional insects with little use of SIT despite its many advantages.
SIT involves mass release of radiation-sterilized insects which mate but produce no offspring thus reducing the population of pests.
They include difficulty in producing male-only sterile insects without the use of radiation which reduces their ability to compete with wild males for mates.
They developed the lethal genetic sexing system in two pests the pink bollworm which damages cotton crops and the diamondback moth
For the first time Stanford biologists have been able to identify specific parent ants and their own children in wild ant colonies making it possible to study reproduction trends.
And in a remarkable display of longevity an original queen ant was found to be producing new ants several decades after mating sending out daughter queens throughout her 20-to 30-year lifespan.
These queen ants are mating once storing that sperm in a special sac keeping it alive
An ant queen produces genetically identical worker ants that live in the same colony and also produces sons and daughter queens.
The daughter queens after mating establish new colonies of their own. Deborah Gordon a biology professor at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment has been studying a particular population of harvester ant colonies in southeastern Arizona for 28 years meticulously recording
when a new colony rises or an older one falls. Gordon's group took the DNA fingerprint of each colony by analyzing a section of microsatellite
By pairing the genetic analysis with the long-term observations Gordon was able to determine the original queen and colony and the order in which the daughter queens and subsequent generations established new colonies.
and many of the daughter queens are not successful. The entire population--the study group consisted of about 300 colonies--relies on just a few queens to make most of the offspring year after year We don't know
whether all harvester ant populations always behave this way or whether these trends hold true for all 11000 ant species
because nobody has identified colony offspring before Gordon said. This gives us new insight on how ant populations change over time.
In general ants play an important role in agriculture around the world with some helping to disperse seeds
while others eat herbivorous insects. Understanding how populations of ant colonies reproduce and expand and the rate at
Across a range of forested ecosystems we are observing widespread mortality events due to stressors such as changing climate drought insects
Vandermeer and colleague Ivette Perfecto of the U-M School of Natural resources and Environment study the complex web of interactions between resident organisms there including various insects fungi birds and bats.
which attacks insects and also helps keep coffee rust fungus in check. Both the widespread use of pesticides and fungicides and the low level of biodiversity found at sun-coffee plantations have contributed likely to the decline of white halo fungus in recent years Vandermeer said.
#Asian needle ants displacing other aggressive invadersresearchers from North carolina State university have found that one of the most aggressive invasive ant species in the United states--The argentine ant--appears to have met its match in the Asian needle ant.
Specifically the researchers have found that the Asian needle ant is successfully displacing Argentine ants in an urban environment indicating that the Asian needle ant--with its venomous sting--may be the next invasive species to see a population boom.
Its aggressive territorial behavior and ability to create huge supercolonies--consisting of thousands of queens
and millions of workers--have enabled The argentine ant to spread across the United States displacing native species
No other ant species had been seen successfully pushing back--until now. In 2008 while watching a supercolony of Argentine ants in an urban environment former NC State Ph d. student Dr. Eleanor Spicer Rice noticed that Asian needle ants (Pachycondyla chinensis) were living
and working in the area. This was surprising because Argentine ants normally do not tolerate any other ant species in their territory
so Spicer Rice decided to investigate further. Over the next four years Spicer Rice found that Argentine ants appeared to ignore Asian needle ants
and the Asian needle ants took advantage of the situation to displace a significant portion of The argentine ant population.
In 2008 Argentine ants had populations in 99 percent of the sites within the study area
while only 9 percent of the sites were home to Asian needle ant populations. By 2011 Argentine ants were found in only 67 percent of the sites
--while the Asian needle ants had expanded to occupy 32 percent of the sites. The two ant species shared 15 percent of the sites in common.
This is the first time we've seen another ant species take territory from Argentine ants says Spicer Rice lead author of a paper on the research.
The researchers think that the Asian needle ant's ability to tolerate cooler temperatures may play a significant role in its ability to push out Argentine ants.
During cold weather both ant species become fairly dormant and cease reproducing limiting their activity and driving their populations down.
However the Asian needle ants become active again much earlier--beginning to reproduce and build new nests in Argentine ant territory as early as March
while The argentine ants remain inactive until late April or early May. The Asian needle ants essentially get a head start Spicer Rice says.
If the Asian needle ant is effective at displacing a dominant species --and it is--then it could be the next major invasive ant species says Dr. Jules Silverman a professor of entomology at NC State
and co-author of the paper. The Asian needle ant is moving into forests and urban environments at the same time Spicer Rice says.
And because it is active at cooler temperatures it could move into a very broad range of territory.
The Asian needle ant has already been found in areas ranging from Alabama to New york city to Oregon.
The rise of the Asian needle ant is bad news. Asian needle ants have venomous stings
which can cause allergic reactions in some humans. Asian needle ants also appear to be driving out native ant populations in forests--including native species that play important roles in ecosystem processes such as dispersing seeds.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by North carolina State university. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Visual reconstruction of the placental ancestor--a small insect-eating animal--was made possible with the help of a powerful cloud-based and publicly accessible database called Morphobank.
We want a robust inflammatory response which is part of our natural programming to defend us against a bug.
when you had insects chewing on the roots explains Below. With the Bt corn though you can protect the root system
Trichomes save insect from beetle predationeveryone needs to eat. But it's a dog-eat-dog world
To cope with this vicious reality a tiny insect that eats plants has learned to employ the plant's hairs for physical protection from its beetle predator.
The insect's recent invasion to the island of Guam has endangered the island's endemic cycad species. Local biologists introduced a voracious beetle predator to the island to eat the scale insects
We began looking into the reasons that the beetle was failing to control the pest
Unfortunately the much larger beetle predator could not make the same journey through the trichomes to feed on the scale insects that were feeding on the plant beneath the trichomes.
and one of those functions is to protect the plant from insects. The glitch in this situation was that the insect that was excluded by the plant hairs was our beneficial insect that eats the scale pest
and the insect that could just walk straight through the hairs was the very pest we wished to control said Marler.
Insects that eat plants have adopted numerous strategies to avoid getting eaten. One of those strategies is to co-opt one of the tactics that plants effectively use to avoid getting eaten.
For example plants produce a plethora of chemicals that taste bad or serve as a poison to herbivores.
These chemicals are effective in deterring the feeding of most general insect herbivores. A well-studied practice by some specialist insects is their predilection to consume these plant poisons sequester those poisons into parts of their body then exploit the poisons for their own protection.
Here we find another example of how an herbivore insect can be confronted with a plant's behavior that helps reduce the likelihood of being eaten then take advantage of that behavior by using it for the same purpose said Marler.
This particular plant-pest-predator relationship has drawn the attention of biologists in the Western Pacific Tropical Research center at the University of Guam
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