#International standards significantly reducing insect stowaways in wood packaging materiala new international standard for wood packaging material used in international trade is significantly slowing the inadvertent export of stowaway invasive bark-and wood
-boring insects according to a study by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS.
of insect stowaways. The study Effectiveness of the International Phytosanitary Standard ISPM No 15 on Reducing Wood Borer Infestation Rates in Wood Packaging Material Entering the United states was published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
Several hundred nonnative forest insect species have become established in the U s . and recent arrivals such as the Asian longhorned beetle and the emerald ash borer have killed millions of trees and altered urban landscapes in the Northeast and Midwest.
The United states implemented the new standard in three phases between 2005 and 2006; as of October 2013 more than 78 countries had implemented ISPM 15.
and his colleagues used data from the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) to compare wood packaging infestation rates from 2 years prior to U s. implementation
Destructive invasive insects have changed forest landscapes in the United states and throughout the world said Michael T. Rains Director of the Northern Research Station
UF researchers discovered species from more than 25 countries on four continents including 35 fossil crustaceans 24 Lepidoptera 17 plants (11 fossils) eight mollusks two
Don Davis curator of Lepidoptera at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History said the Florida Museum has pursued actively the goals of all natural history museums including discovering new organisms to better understand the current distributions
Florida Museum assistant curator of Lepidoptera Akito Kawahara said new species of insects sometimes lead to powerful discoveries that affect other fields including agriculture and medicine.
Future research will include the investigation of a potential new species of moth in Hawaii that appears to delay plant aging by altering the process of plant senescence (aging) in leaves he said.
This moth could have potential for improving agriculture and extending the shelf life of some foods.
The small insects do actually fly over distances of 50 kilometres. Tamara Pokorny has a theory regarding how they get the energy necessary for those long distances without being forced to stop
#Biological control for brazilian peppertree closer than evera South american insect could help control the invasive Brazilian peppertree in places where it supplants critical habitat for many organisms according to University of Florida and U s. Department of agriculture scientists.
For the experiments UF and USDA researchers brought two types of thrips--tiny insects that often feed on plants--from Brazil to Florida laboratories.
Both thrips feed on the Brazilian peppertree but scientists found Ouro Preto was more cold-tolerant than a thrips from farther north in Brazil.
Scientists predict the insect will thrive in Florida where temperatures sometimes dip below freezing which is only slightly colder than the insect is used to. â#oethe idea of biological control is to reunite these highly specialized natural enemies with their host plant in this case Brazilian peppertree to help reduce plant densities in the invaded areaâ#said Veronica Manrique a UF
senior biological scientist and lead author of the study. â#oewe are also working with two other natural enemies a psyllid
and a defoliating weevil which should further reduce Brazilian peppertree growth and reproduction in Florida. â#Scientists will now seek permission to release the thrips into areas Brazilian peppertree is growing.
The USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service will review the joint UF/IFAS and USDA petition for the thripsâ##release Overholt said.
That agency typically takes 1â to two years to decide whether the thrips is a safe control agent. â#oeif we get this far we will release the thrips at several locations in South
and Central Florida initially mostly on public lands because thatâ##s where the problem is said biggestâ#Overholt. â#oeif we have success here Iâ##m sure folks in Hawaii
and Texas will want to introduce the insect. Eventually there may also be interest in other areas of the world such as Australia. â#Starting in the 1800s two types of Brazilian peppertree were brought to Florida Overholt said.
A southern Brazil variety was brought to an area along the Gulf Coast probably near Punta Gorda;
According to their research published online this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences these fossil beetles indicate that during a period of global warming in the geological past there were mild frost-free winters extended even in the uplands
because it is an economically important and well understood crop that relies on insect pollination.
honey bees bumble bees southeastern blueberry bees carpenter bees and a functionally similar collection of species that they termed small native bees.
The role of root infection by insect-carried bacterial pathogens has been underestimated greatly said Evan Johnson a research assistant scientist with UF's Institute of food and agricultural sciences.
Citrus greening first enters the tree via a tiny insect the Asian citrus psyllid which sucks on leaf sap
To battle greening UF/IFAS researchers have attempted everything from trying to eradicate the psyllid to breeding trees that show better greening resistance.
while psyllid control is essential growers should make careful decisions on how many resources to devote to any management strategy for greening-infected trees based on their economic means until field trials have been completed.
and Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in which bees abandon their hives over the winter and eventually die.
or parasites as a result of exposure to pesticides the new study found that bees in the hives exhibiting CCD had almost identical levels of pathogen infestation as a group of control hives most
We demonstrated again in this study that neonicotinoids are highly likely to be responsible for triggering CCD in honey bee hives that were healthy prior to the arrival of winter said lead author Chensheng (Alex) Lu associate professor of environmental exposure
since bees are prime pollinators of roughly one-third of all crops worldwide. Experts have considered a number of possible causes including pathogen infestation beekeeping practices and pesticide exposure.
There was a steady decline in the size of all the bee colonies through the beginning of winter--typical among hives during the colder months in New england.
but populations in the neonicotinoid-treated hives continued to decline. By April 2013 6 out of 12 of the neonicotinoid-treated colonies were lost with abandoned hives that are typical of CCD.
Only one of the control colonies was lost--thousands of dead bees were found inside the hive--with what appeared to be symptoms of a common intestinal parasite called Nosema ceranae.
While the 12 pesticide-treated hives in the current study experienced a 50%CCD mortality rate the authors noted that in their 2012 study bees in pesticide-treated hives had a much higher CCD mortality rate--94%.
%That earlier bee die off occurred during the particularly cold and prolonged winter of 2010-2011 in central Massachusetts leading the authors to speculate that colder temperatures in combination with neonicotinoids may play a role in the severity of CCD.
because tree-of-heaven is very hard to kill said Davis. The researchers noticed a number of Ambrosia beetles near the infected stands leading them to theorize that the fungus often carried through the forests by beetles was involved in the tree deaths.
The Ambrosia beetles may explain some of the long-range spread of the disease said Davis. One theory is that the beetles feed on an infected tree
#Homemade stink bug traps squash store-bought models, researchers finda Virginia Tech team of researchers has proven that homemade inexpensive stink bug traps crafted from simple
household items outshine pricier models designed to kill the invasive annoying bugs. This discovery comes
and put a light over the pan to attract the bugs in a dark room.
The trap eliminated 14 times more stink bugs than store-bought traps that cost up to $50 the study found.
http://vimeo. com/92354801we knew that insects are attracted generally to light so we were able to exploit that with these traps said John Aigner a doctoral student in the Department of Entomology.
and Tom Kuhar an entomology professor and Virginia Cooperative Extension specialist enlisted the help of citizen scientists--homeowners who were annoyed by the infestation of stink bugs in their houses--to evaluate different types of traps for ridding homes
of bugs. The study was conducted in 16 houses over two years. Currently there are no in-home insecticides labeled for use against brown marmorated stink bugs
The bug is now found in 41 states. Still the solution could give some reprieve to homeowners who find thousands of these cilantro-smelling bugs in their homes.
The real devastation comes in the form of damage to farmers said Kuhar. Stink bugs feed as nymphs and adults on the fruit and pods of plants which maximizes their chances to render a crop unmarketable.
These bugs have been documented to feed on many of our important agricultural crops including apples peaches grapes soybean peppers tomatoes corn and cotton.
Treatment of the insects in crops is costly because the insecticides required to control it are broad spectrum toxicants that are highly disruptive to integrated pest management programs.
The few native natural enemies they have can easily be killed with the same insecticide used to target the stink bugs themselves he said.
The research team looked at the effects of three pesticides--diazinon imidacloprid and propiconazole--on the aquatic invertebratesgammarus pulex (freshwater shrimp) Gammarus fossarum (freshwater shrimp) and Lymnaea stagnalis (pond snail.
which are designed to kill pest insects. Toxicity of these neurotoxicants does vary a lot among species--in our study the shrimps turned out to be much more sensitive than the pond snail.
The research team looked at the effects of three pesticides--diazinon imidacloprid and propiconazole--on the aquatic invertebratesgammarus pulex (freshwater shrimp) Gammarus fossarum (freshwater shrimp) and Lymnaea stagnalis (pond snail.
which are designed to kill pest insects. Toxicity of these neurotoxicants does vary a lot among species--in our study the shrimps turned out to be much more sensitive than the pond snail.
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.
In addition this was the first study to use tree rings to track the spread of an invasive tree-feeding insect.
and two Canadian provinces and have become the most destructive and costly forest insect to ever invade North america Mccullough said.
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
The Asian ash species have evolved with the beetles so healthy trees there are resistant to them.
#Scientists link Africanized honeybees changing roles throughout their lives to brain chemistryscientists have been linking an increasing range of behaviors
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.
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.
Simple and elegant mechanism regulates relationships between insects and bacteriasymbiosis is the process that occurs
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.
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.
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
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.
whether the flies will evolve resistance as human head lice have done. Clayton believes that will not happen
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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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