Ant diversity indicates restored grasslandswhen it comes to restoring grasslands ecologists may have another way to evaluate their progress--ants.
When it comes to native grasslands ants are ecosystem engineers. Ecological role of antsants play many ecological roles Winkler explained.
Ants move more soil than earthworms plus they are food for lots of reptiles and birds.
Some ant species support colonies of plant-feeding insects such as aphids or plant hoppers even protecting them from predators.
It's like having dairy cattle Winkler said. Through this technique the ants consume the sugar-rich honey dew the aphids secrete
much as humans use cow's milk. When the ants are need in of protein they simply eat the aphids.
Ants also distribute organic matter by moving dead insects into the colonies and their dead nest mates away from the colonies Winkler added.
Comparing restored undisturbed grasslandswinkler compared tracts of restored grasslands to undisturbed ones at three sites in eastern South dakota--Sioux Prairie in Minnehaha County Oak Lake Field Station
Originally from Des moines Iowa she began working with ants as an undergraduate at Iowa State university focusing on how burning
and how many of the ants are out foraging Winkler pointed out. She suspects that management techniques may also have played a role.
The younger restorations areas tend to have ants that are generalists who can go anywhere
but the older restorations tend to have more specialists such as soil-dwelling ants who are more particular about where they live Winkler explained.
You'll have ants everywhere she pointed out but the greater the diversity the more niches are being filled and the more successful the restoration effort.
Termites, fungi play more important role in decomposition than temperatureclimate change models could have a thing
or two to learn from termites and fungi according to a new study released this week.
and termites which help break down wood may play a more significant role in the rate of decomposition than temperature alone.
and biology of fungi and termites is a key to understanding how the rate of decomposition will vary from place to place.
because they reflect the activity of fungi and termites. The team suggests that scientists need to embrace the variability found across data collected from many different sites instead of averaging it all together to create better models with more accurate predictions.
whether to the consumption of fungi growing on the wood or to termites consuming the wood.
Like many other insect pollinators bees find their way around by using a polarization sensitive area in their eyes to'see'skylight polarization patterns.
However while other insects are known to use such sensitivity to identify appropriate habitats locate suitable sites to lay their eggs
whether bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) can learn the polarization patterns of artificial'flowers 'in order to obtain a food reward.
They found that freely foraging bumblebees soon learnt to differentiate between rewarding (sucrose solution providing) and aversive (quinine solution providing) artificial'flowers'with two different polarization patterns.
Both pollinator and plant fitness is greatly dependent on the ability of pollinators to discriminate flowers accurately
which pollinators can discriminate flowers and it is advantageous for a plant to produce a number of different signals that a pollinator can utilise effectively.
Our findings suggest polarisation vision may provide sensory access to an additional floral cue for bees.
Writtle College and several conservation organizations (the Society for Conservation Biology Royal Society for Protection of Birds Birdlife Europe Butterfly Conservation Europe and Friends of the Earth--Switzerland.
While some specific carefully designed actions--such as planting flowers for pollinators restoring species-rich grassland
and diverse communities of wild insects to pollinate crops or regulate pest outbreaks. These are enjoyed things by everyone
and launch a couple drones that fly out over his farms and collect imagery that's sent wirelessly to his office Bowman said.
Citrus greening first enters the tree via a tiny bug the Asian citrus psyllid which sucks on leaf sap
UF/IFAS researchers have attempted everything from trying to eradicate the psyllid to breeding citrus rootstock that shows better greening resistance.
#Parasites fail to halt European bumblebee invasion of the UKA species of bee from Europe that has stronger resistance to parasite infections than native bumblebees has spread across the UK according to new research at Royal Holloway
The study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology shows that tree bumblebees have rapidly spread
despite them carrying high levels of an infection that normally prevents queen bees from producing colonies.
Researchers collected tree bumblebee queens from the wild checked them for parasites and then monitored colony development in a laboratory
and high levels of a nematode parasite that usually castrates other species 25 per cent of the queens were able to produce offspring.
Scientists believe the spread of tree bumblebees could have both positive and negative impacts on native bees.
Since its arrival to the UK the tree bumblebee has been rapidly spreading despite high levels of this castrating parasite said researcher Catherine Jones from the School of Biological sciences at Royal Holloway.
and the populations of our native bumblebees have declined in recent decades. The arrival of tree bumblebees could be hugely beneficial to us by absorbing parasite pressure from our native species as well as helping to pollinate wild plants and crops.
Professor Mark Brown from the School of Biological sciences at Royal Holloway added: While these findings show promising signs for bee populations in the UK we still don't know
if the bumblebees compete for food or nesting sites. Further research should focus on how our native bees are affected
and a plant protein has been found to be safe for honeybees --despite being highly toxic to a number of key insect pests.
New research led by Newcastle University UK has tested the insect-specific Hv1a/GNA fusion protein bio-pesticide--a combination of a natural toxin from the venom of an Australian funnel web spider
and snowdrop lectin. Feeding acute and chronic doses to honeybees--beyond the levels they would ever experience in the field--the team found it had only a very slight effect on the bees'survival and no measurable effect at all on their learning and memory.
Publishing their findings today in the academic journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B the authors say the insect-specific compound has huge potential as an environmentally-benign'bee-safe'bio-pesticide and an alternative to the chemical neonicotinoid pesticides
which have been linked to declines in pollinator populations. Honeybees perform sophisticated behaviors while foraging that require them to learn
and remember floral traits associated with food. Disruption to this important function has profound implications for honeybee colony survival
because bees that cannot learn will not be able to find food and return to their hives.
By pollinating some key crop species honeybees make a vital contribution to food security. The decline of these insects raises significant concerns about our ability to feed a growing population.
Professor Angharad Gatehouse based in Newcastle University's School of Biology and one of the supervisors on the project explains:
Our findings suggest that Hv1a/GNA is unlikely to cause any detrimental effects on honeybees.
Previous studies have shown already that it is safe for higher animals which means it has real potential as a pesticide and offers us a safe alternative to some of those currently on the market.
The project is part of the Insect Pollinators Initiative jointly funded by the Biotechnology and Biological sciences Research Council Defra the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) the Scottish government and the Wellcome Trust under the auspices of the Living
with Environmental Change (LWEC) partnership. This research involving academics from Newcastle and Durham Universities and the Food and Environment Research Agency was funded by the UK's innovation agency the Technology Strategy Board.
This is an oral pesticide so unlike some that get absorbed through the exoskeleton the spider/snowdrop recombinant protein has to be ingested by the insects.
Although Hv1a/GNA was carried to the brain of the honeybee it had no effect on the insect
Dr Geraldine Wright one of the authors on the paper heads up Newcastle University's Honeybee Lab. Last year she led the research
and remember and subsequently communicate to their hive mates. Around 90pc of the world's plants are directly
or indirectly reliant on pollinators to survive she explains. If we destroy the biodiversity of pollinators then it will be irrelevant how effective our pesticides are
because we won't have any crops to protect. There is now substantial evidence linking neonicotinoid pesticides to poor performance and survival in bees and
and insect-specific pesticides will be just one part of that. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Newcastle University.
They get old die (due to fire insects hurricane etc. and regenerate. This paper improves on a fundamental theory in ecosystem development:
& Tropical Medicine today launch Bug Off--the first ever Insect repellent Awareness Day to highlight the issue.
They recommend applying repellents containing 20-50%DEET to the skin when in countries with diseases spread by insects such as malaria and dengue fever.
However the scientists behind Bug Off have carried out a review of published studies and conclude that there is insufficient evidence to show that DEET is unsafe.
Brazil for example has dengue fever--a viral infection that is transmitted to humans by Aedes mosquitoes which can cause life-threatening illness.
and misconceptions about how to repel mosquitoes and other biting insects which can leave people at risk of harm to their health.
The Bug Off campaign also involves an educational outreach programme including school visits and a poster competition
which opens today. Key facts on insect repellents: Dr James Logan Senior Lecturer in Medical Entomology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Director of arctec said:
and when insects transmit disease and we also teach courses on all aspects of biting insects vector-borne diseases and travel health.
We hope Insect repellent Awareness Day will cause people to stop and think this summer and pack their repellents.
Plant-feeding insects are attracted often to odors that are released by damaged plant tissue because these plants are already under attack
The jumping plant louse Diaphorina citri hones in on the odor methyl salicylate that is released by damaged young leaves of citrus trees
Jumping plant lice that fly towards the source of the odor are duped: they will not find enough food there as the bacterium has lowered drastically the nutritional quality of infected leaves.
Enter the wasp Tamarixia radiata which lays its eggs on young jumping plant lice so that the wasp larvae can feed on them.
Lukasz Stelinski and colleagues from the University of Florida asked whether the wasp is attracted likewise to the odor of methyl salicylate while hunting for plant lice.
They placed female wasps in an olfactometer a Y-shaped device that delivers two opposing air flows each carrying a different odor.
The wasps had the choice of flying towards methyl salicylate or to a control odor such as limonene another compound produced by citrus trees.
The wasps were attracted strongly to the smell of both bacteria-infected and louse-infested citrus plants and also to pure methyl salicylate.
A further experiment revealed that the wasps were more likely to find and attack young plant lice on plants infected with the bacterium
or on plants that had been treated with methyl salicylate. This proves that the wasp finds its prey by eavesdropping on the odor signal exchanged between bacteria citrus trees and plant lice.
Communication between species is widespread in nature but almost always involves only two or three species. Here we show for the first time that the same signal connects four different species each at a different level in the food chain.
#Butterfly eyespots add detail to story of evolutiona new study of the colorful eyespots on the wings of some butterfly species is helping to address fundamental questions about evolution that are conceptually similar to the quandary Aristotle wrestled with about 330 B c
and across vast numbers of species. Repeated vertebra that form a spinal column rows of teeth and groups of eyespots on butterfly wings are all examples of serial homologues.
Butterfly wings are helping to answer that question. These eyespots common to the butterfly Family nymphalidae now serve many butterflies in dual roles of both predator avoidance and mate identification.
One theory of their origin is evolved that they from simpler single spots; another theory is evolved that they from a band of color
What we basically conclude is that neither of the existing theories about butterfly eyespots is correct said Jeffrey Oliver a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Integrative Biology of the OSU College of Science.
and because of that value were retained by future generations of butterflies. And at all times they retained the biological capacity for positional awareness--the eyespots formed in the same place until a new mutation came along.
At first it appears the eyespots helped this group of butterflies with one of the most basic aspects of survival value
But this directed the attack toward the tips of less-important wings and not the more vulnerable head or body of the insect.
There they performed a completely different function--helping the butterfly to attract and be identified by optimal mates.
But one bone or butterfly eyespot at a time the pieces continue to come together. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Oregon State university.
#Slowing the insect invasion: Wood packaging sanitation yields US $11. 7 billion net benefitthe emerald ash borer (Agrilus plantipenis) a recent insect immigrant to North america carried in with the wooden
packing material of imported goods is projected to cause over a billion dollars in damages annually over the next decade.
or heat treatment of wood pallets and crates to prevent the inadvertent import of new wood boring insect pests in shipping materials.
and colleagues estimate that the economic benefits of slowing the introduction of wood boring insect pests will accumulate a net benefit of $11. 7 billion taking into account benefits minus costs through 2050.
by listening in on the conversations honeybees have with each other. The scientists'analyses of honeybee waggle dances reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 22 suggest that costly measures to set aside agricultural lands
and let the wildflowers grow can be very beneficial to bees. In the past two decades the European union has spent â1 billion on agri-environment schemes which aim to improve the rural landscape health
and are required for all EU-member states says Margaret Couvillon of the Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects at the University of Sussex.
Our work uses a novel source of data--the honeybee an organism that itself can benefit from a healthy rural landscape--to evaluate
and decoded the waggle dances of bees in three hives over a two-year period. Bees dance to tell their fellow bees where to find the good stuff:
and by extension other insect pollinators are concerned--is called a place Castle Hill which happened to be the only National Nature Reserve in the area.
The study shows that honeybees can serve as bioindicators to monitor large land areas and provide information relevant to better environmental management the researchers say.
It also gives new meaning to the term worker bee. Imagine the time manpower and cost to survey such an area on foot--to monitor nectar sources for quality and quantity of production to count the number of other flower-visiting insects to account for competition
and then to do this over and over for two foraging years Couvillon says. Instead we have let the honeybees do the hard work of surveying the landscape and integrating all relevant costs and then providing through their dance communication this biologically relevant information about landscape quality.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Cell Press. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Costa rica The tiny size and delicately fringed wings of the parasitoid wasp family Mymaridae led to their common name:
and is among the smallest insects. It is the latest addition to the 1400 or so known species of the family.
Although its host is known not yet like other fairyflies it presumably has a life span of not more than a few days and attacks the eggs of other insects.
or hitchhike on other cave animals such as bats or crickets to travel longer distances. Why inventory mattersi have been participating in the top 10 since its beginning in 2008 and
#More male bugs in a warmer world? Temperature influences gender of offspring in bugswhether an insect will have a male
or female offspring depends on the weather according to a study led by Joffrey Moiroux and Jacques Brodeur of the University of Montreal's Department of Biological sciences.
The research involved experimenting with a species of oophagous parasitoid (Trichogramma euproctidis) an insect that lays its eggs inside a host insect that will be consumed by the future larvae.
We know that climate affects the reproductive behaviour of insects. But we never clearly demonstrated the effects of climate change on sex allocation in parasitoids Moiroux explained.
Cold impairs gender selectionas in bees wasps and ants the gender determination of Trichogramma parasitoids is called haplodiploid that is fertilized eggs produce female offspring
while unfertilized eggs produce male offspring summarizes Moiroux. It is possible to predict whether the parasitoid will lay a son
Increasing fitnessin insects fitness is correlated positively with the size of an individual and this relationship is greater in females than in males.
In Quebec the European corn borer is a pest that farmers face every year. The parasitoid Trichogramma for its part is an ally
since its larvae kill this insect host. It is of the utmost importance to clearly identify harmful and beneficial insects in the field
in order to adopt an appropriate strategy for integrated pest management Moiroux said. He will now be looking at
These diminutive insect-eating creatures which breed in Pennsylvania and winter in Central and South america contribute greatly to the health of forests.
The discovery is reported this week in the journal Physical Review Letters by associate professor of mechanical engineering Thomas Peacock and four others.
The finding was unexpected an outcome of research on other effects of temperature differences such as the way winds form over glaciers in a valley Peacock says.
People had studied only ever this phenomenon in relation to a fixed object Peacock says. But his group realized that
Peacock's first study of the concept about four years ago focused on slow flows caused by diffusion--work that demonstrated that induced boundary flows can generate small propulsive forces.
and cooling of an object could be more significant Peacock says. But perfecting the experimental setup was challenging.
The effect itself is surprisingly simple Peacock explains: By virtue of heating or cooling the surface of an object you change the density of any fluid next to that surface.
The changed density of the fluid generates a flow over the surface Peacock says adding That flow then creates unbalanced forces with lower pressure on one side
and its temperature is different from that of the fluid Peacock says. The basic equations that govern convection are well known Peacock says.
This type of flow has been studied for over 100 years but somehow in all that time no one had thought to do this.
Peacock is already working on such follow-up experiments to figure out whether the effect can be exploited in an engineering sense
It may Peacock says even turn out to be something that living organisms have learned to harness:
It's very rare in fluid mechanics to discover a new phenomenon like this Peacock says.
In addition to Peacock the work was carried out by former MIT postdoc Matthieu Mercier now at the Institut de MÃ canique des Fluides de Toulouse in France;
#Fairy circles apparently not created by termites after allfor several decades scientists have been trying to come up with an explanation for the formation of the enigmatic vegetation-free circles frequently found in certain African grassland regions.
of which hypothesises that these mysterious patches are the work of termites. The insects allegedly nibble away at the grassroots
thus causing the dieback of vegetation. Other researchers consider hydrocarbons emanating from the depths of the earth being responsible for this phenomenon.
However in his view this rather discredits the generally popular termite theory. In a study published in the scientific journal Science (2013) the sand termite species Psammotermes allocerus was presented indeed as most likely suspect for the creation of the enigmatic barren patches
--albeit primarily based on the argument that the occurrence of this particular species of termites has been common to all fairy circles investigated at the time.
No one has observed so far these creatures actually grazing holes into the Namibian grasslands--let alone in such consistent patterns.
There is up to now not one single piece of evidence demonstrating that social insects are capable of creating homogenously distributed structures on such a large scale.
The entire range of studies covering the distribution of ant and termite populations in arid territories predominantly rather attests to the occurrence of irregular clustered distribution patterns at large scales.
And according to the research team underground emission of abiotic gases as well is unlikely to result in such evenly dispersed and homogeneous spatial distribution.
what happens on a molecular basis in insects that evolved resistance to genetically engineered cotton plants.
Their findings reported in the May 19 issue of the journal PLOS ONE shed light on how the global caterpillar pest called pink bollworm overcomes biotech cotton
which was designed to make an insect-killing bacterial protein called Bt toxin. The results could have major impacts for managing pest resistance to Bt crops.
By understanding how insects adapt to Bt crops we can devise better strategies to delay the evolution of resistance
Based on laboratory experiments aimed at determining the molecular mechanisms involved scientists knew that pink bollworm can evolve resistance against the Bt toxin
Farmers in the U s. but not in India adopted tactics designed to slow evolution of resistance in pink bollworm.
and implement resistance management strategies such as providing refuges of standard cotton plants that do not produce Bt proteins and releasing sterile pink bollworm moths.
Planting refuges near Bt crops allows susceptible insects to survive and reproduce and thus reduces the chances that two resistant insects will mate with each other
and produce resistant offspring. Similarly mass release of sterile moths also makes it less likely for two resistant individuals to encounter each other and mate.
As a result pink bollworm has been eradicated all but in the southwestern U s. Suppression of this pest with Bt cotton is the cornerstone of an integrated pest management program that has allowed Arizona cotton growers to reduce broad spectrum insecticide use by 80
percent saving them over $10 million annually. In the U s. pink bollworm populations have not evolved resistance to Bt toxins in the wild.
However resistant pink bollworm populations have emerged in India which grows the most Bt cotton of any country in the world.
Crops genetically engineered to produce proteins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis --or Bt--were introduced in 1996 and planted on more than 180 million acres worldwide during 2013.
The emergence of resistant pink bollworm in India provided the researchers an opportunity to test the hypothesis that insects in the field would evolve resistance to Bt toxin by the same genetic mechanism found previously in the lab. In the lab strains the scientists had identified mutations in a gene
which leaves the insect unscathed by the Bt toxin. We wanted to see if field-resistant pink bollworm from India harbored these same changes in the cadherin gene Fabrick said.
He said that by collaborating with Indian scientists we discovered that the same cadherin gene is associated with the resistance in India
but the mutations are different and much more numerous than the ones we found in lab-selected pink bollworm from Arizona.
Sequencing the DNA of resistant pink bollworm collected from the field in India the team found that the insects produce remarkably diverse disrupted variants of cadherin.
The researchers learned that the astonishing diversity of cadherin in pink bollworm from India is caused by alternative splicing a novel mechanism of resistance that allows a single DNA sequence to code for many variants of a protein.
Mario Soberã n a Bt expert at the Universidad Nacional Autã noma de MÃ xico in Cuernavaca who was not an author of the study commented This is a neat example of the diverse mechanisms insect
An important implication is that DNA screening would not be efficient for monitoring resistance of pink bollworm to Bt toxins.
The nests have several cells with an egg in each one that metamorphosizes--like butterflies do--through the summer.
By fall they are adults in their cocoons where they overwinter. The initial phase of the program that Bunker and Devan have initiated with the help of other NJIT colleagues
while they are still dormant in their cocoons. A video camera placed at each nest will allow building a database of the bees'response to manipulated changes in their natural schedule
It may give flies wasps and other predators greater opportunities to attack undefended eggs and larvae.
and managing these vital pollinators. The data that Bunker and Devan anticipate collecting over the next few years could confirm a disturbing possibility--that the critical relationship between temperature-sensitive bees
Yet they may find that pollinators such as the bees at Morristown can adapt in ways that do not seriously undermine their role in pollination and by implication in agricultural production.
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