The shrimp have translucent bodies and creep like inchworms along rocks in shallow tidal zones. Another top species the domed land snail looks like a slow-moving ghost:
Last week at a coffee farm in Costa rica I stumbled upon hundreds of butterflies probably some kind of Heliconius species all fluttering around a particular spot.
It's like that with butterflies. But as we stood and watched they eventually settled on almost everything around.
For many butterfly species finding a good place to stop and rest isn't easy.
Deforestation drought and shifts in global temperature are all altering butterfly habitat. Monarch butterflies in particular face a highly specific threat from humans:
the weed-killer commonly known as Roundup or glyphosate. In the past decade as the use of this potent chemical has skyrocketed monarch populations have plummeted.
and find ways to help protect monarch butterflies. Over the past decade Roundup has become the most popular weed-killer in the country.
One of the plants it's wiping out is milkweed the sole source of food for monarch butterfly larvae.
what particular plant attracted the butterflies at the coffee farm but there are a number of sweet-smelling plants around the area.
This knowledge gives the EPA an opportunity to muzzle a direct threat to butterflies. Immediately limiting the use of glyphosate
and these sluggish tree-dwellers also serve as a hotel for moths and algae.</</p><p>Three-toed sloths descend from the trees once a week to defecate providing a breeding ground for moths that live in the animals'fur
and nourishing gardens of algae that supplement the sloths'diet new research finds. Leaving the trees burns energy
Some plants can even hear able to distinguish the vibration patterns made by different chewing caterpillars according to a study detailed this summer in the journal Oecologia Gilroy said.
and fruits but they will also munch on eggs small insects caterpillars small animals and even young snakes.
Unlike birds and butterflies the drab millimeter-long gloomy scale has invited not enthusiastic long-term monitoring.
and 3 percent comes from termites and caterpillars. The mountain gorilla eats a diet that is about 86 percent leaves shoots and stems;
Halting the African armyworm: Nature Newsa plague of crop-eating caterpillars has struck Liberia and a second wave could spread across West Africa in the next few weeks,
the Food and agriculture organization of the united nations (FAO) has warned. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Liberia's president, has declared a state of emergency
The African armyworm is the caterpillar of the night-flying moth Spodoptera exempta, and is a major crop pest,
From October to December one of the rainy seasons the moths lay their eggs on grasses and crops in Kenya and Tanzania.
They subsequently pupate to form moths, each of which can fly up to 1, 000 kilometres and lay 1, 000 eggs in its 10-day lifetime.
Armyworms have attacked, with varying intensity, 48 times in the past 55 years, says David Grzywacz, an expert on the caterpillars at the Natural resources Institute of the University of Greenwich, UK.
The second wave of moths generally fly north or south of eastern Africa, to countries such as Ethiopia or Zambia.
Liberia in western Africa, was prepared simply not to deal with the threat, he says. The caterpillars have munched through cocoa, bananas and maize (corn),
and are defecating in water supplies. So far more than 100 villages and around 500,000 people have been affected,
says the FAO's Christopher Matthews. Many of the armyworms have bored now into the ground,
When they re-emerge as moths in a week to 12 days he says, a second wave may spread into neighbouring countries such as Guinea and Sierra leone.
and moths have been spotted in some regions of Liberia, Tucker says. The caterpillars can be sprayed with pesticides
as soon as they are detected. Tanzania has a network of pheromone traps set up as monitoring devices to attract the moths
as soon as they appear. The country also stockpiles pesticides to deal with the caterpillars. But because it was taken by surprise,
Liberia was unable to deal with the threat fast enough. Initially farmers who could not get hold of pesticides set fire to worms
so Liberia must prepare for a second wave of moths. The idea of using pheromones to corral the moths together for destruction won't work,
says Grzywacz there will be too many to control cost-effectively. Neighbouring countries are already spraying pesticides in preparation.
If the weather conditions continue to be good for armyworms (generally scattered showers and warm), he says,
then the next wave of moths will be initiating a second generation of outbreaks in a few weeks,
the weather conditions may turn against the armyworms and things may gradually subside.
Cutting out the chemicals: Nature Newsozone experts are exploring ways to curb powerful greenhouse gases of their own making under the Montreal Protocol,
The researchers were studying pink bollworm (Pectinophora gossypiella) a particular nuisance in the cotton fields of the southern United states. Crops expressing Cry1ac have held thus far largely the pest at bay,
so the team raised a number of different laboratory strains of pink bollworms on a diet that contained the toxin.
they generated a strain of pink bollworm that was not only resistant to 240-times higher levels of Cry2ab than normal,
The resistant pink bollworms were able to withstand high concentrations of both toxins in their diets,
Nature News Liberia's caterpillar plague Panic struck Liberia in early 2009, after a plague of caterpillars struck villages around the country, munching trees
while the UN's Food and agriculture organization (FAO) warned of further attacks to come (see'Halting the African armyworm').
'While some 400,000 villagers had to temporarily abandon their caterpillar-saturated homes, the impact of the pests turned out to be less calamitous than at first suggested.
The situation was exacerbated by an early misidentification of the caterpillar as an armyworm (a devastating crop pest that regularly attacks eastern Africa,
In fact it turned out to be Achaea catocaloides, a less threatening caterpillar that feeds mostly on the Dahoma tree.
As for the armyworm, it continues to cause devastation in eastern Africa each year. Outbreaks and high moth catches have already been reported in northern Tanzania,
says Ken Wilson, an ecologist at Lancaster University, UK. Together with the UK-based development organization CABI, he and fellow researchers have received just around £500, 000 (US$800,
000) over the next 18 months from the UK government to develop an armyworm early warning and control system in Tanzania.
Butterfly paper bust-up In August the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a paper online by Donald Williamson, a retired zoologist at the University of Liverpool, UK,
reporting that ancient butterflies accidentally mated with wormlike animals to give rise to caterpillars. The study which was communicated'by Lynn Margulis, of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
which is engineered to be resistant to the European corn-borer caterpillar, was licensed in 1998. The sluggish pace of approval for GM CROPS means that
although one crop, a Chinese GMO cotton that is resistant to bollworm, has proved extremely useful to the population,
In 1997, the Chinese government approved the commercial cultivation of cotton plants genetically modified to produce a toxin from the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) that is deadly to the bollworm Helicoverpa armigera.
Outbreaks of larvae of the cotton bollworm moth in the early 1990s had hit crop yields and profits,
and the pesticides used to control the bollworm damaged the environment and caused thousands of deaths from poisoning each year.
Mirids can reduce cotton yields just as much as bollworms, up to 50%when not controlled, Wu adds.
bollworms developed resistance and rose to become the primary pest. Similarly, stink bugs have replaced bollworms as the primary pest in southeastern United states
since Bt cotton was introduced. Along with genetically modified crops, says Andow, farmers need effective systems for responding to changes in pest abundance.
Meanwhile, Chinese researchers are trying to develop cotton plants that kill both bollworms and mirids. Wu stresses,
which kills the European corn borer (Ostrinia nubilalis). They found that since the crop was introduced in 1996, US farmers in the key maize-growing states of Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois,
Not only does Bt maize suppress the corn-borer population in fields planted with the GM crop
Overall, Hutchison's team found that corn-borer populations have declined by between 27%and 73%across the five states in the 14 years
Conventional growers also help to stop corn borers becoming resistant to the Bt toxin by hosting pest populations that are susceptible to it, according to the team's research.
the corn earworm (Helicoverpa zea), has evolved resistance to Bt toxin in situations where GM-crop coverage is 100%.
so they could grow corn borers, says Hutchison, but over 14 years it's been very successful.
Hutchison says that the authors who work for industry provided data about corn borers and were involved not in the financial calculations.
Sterile moths wipe out cotton pest: Nature Newsbetween May and October for four consecutive years, aeroplanes crisscrossed the morning skies above Arizona's cotton fields, dropping millions of tiny moths onto the croplands below.
The little grey insects are among the world's most notorious agricultural pests: their larvae are the pink bollworms (Pectinophora gossypiella), also known as'pinkies'.
'However, the moths released from the planes were different from those responsible for the caterpillars munching their way through the state's cotton crops.
They were sterile. The moth-drops were part of a programme to wipe the dreaded pinkie off the Arizona map for good.
State officials hoped that the combination of sterile moths and genetically modified cotton crops, engineered to produce a toxin deadly to pinkies,
would put an end to farmers'costly struggle against the caterpillars. The strategy was intended to restrict the spread of toxin-resistant pink bollworms by flooding the population with sterile moths.
When rare resistant moths emerged as they inevitably would, they would probably encounter a sterile partner,
and their genes would be erased from the population. It was a risky approach. To test the plan,
Arizona farmers had to give up the strategies normally used to suppress toxin-resistant bollworms so
if the sterile-moth strategy failed they could be faced with a bigger pinkie problem than ever.
When Bruce Tabashnik, an entomologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, first heard about the scheme, he was worried.
%The pink bollworm was gone all but. Sterile insect releases have already been used to drive down populations of the Mediterranean fruit fly,
The idea behind the refuges is to keep a population of non-resistant moths close at hand as potential mates for any resistant moths that arise.
Unfortunately, however, refuges also guarantee a steady local population of pink bollworms. After a while, farmers came to resent the refuges that allowed the bollworm to persist year after year,
costing them millions of dollars annually in crop losses and insecticide sprays. They asked the US Environmental protection agency for permission to dispense with the refuges
and instead begin releasing sterile moths. Still sceptical Tabashnik and his colleagues developed computer simulations to predict the consequences of the farmers'proposed strategy.
and sterile-moth releases could wipe out pest populations and stave off Bt resistance for at least 20 years.
In 2005, the Pink bollworm Rearing Facility in Phoenix began cranking out pinkies for the Arizona experiment.
The factory treated the moths with just enough radiation to damage the chromosomes in their reproductive cells without causing injuries that would prevent their survival in the wild.
about 2 billion pink bollworm moths were released into Arizona's cotton fields. By 2009, a survey of 16,600 cotton bolls from conventional crops yielded only two pink bollworm larvae,
and farmers had stopped using insecticide sprays to keep the pinkie population in check. So far, no live pink bollworm caterpillars have been found in bolls of cotton this season,
says Tabashnik. The results are tremendous says entomologist William Hutchison at the University of Minnesota in St paul,
Plans to eliminate the pink bollworm from the United states and northern Mexico cost $30 million a year between 2006 and 2009.
whether pink bollworm is eradicated or not, it's a question of how economically damaging it is,
And in 2009 and 2010, pink bollworm was no longer an economically damaging pest in Arizona.
Mayans converted wetlands to farmland: Nature Newsthe ancient Maya civilization is recognized widely for its awe-inspiring pyramids, sophisticated mathematics and advanced written language.
or a moth's almost perfect mimicry of tree bark. In some snails, however, it's simply down to a poor fit with a snake's jaw.
Take the endangered Quino checkerspot butterfly Euphydryas editha quino of Southern California. We do know that climate change is important:
and warm the butterfly's habitat it will cause increased starvation and extinction. But many populations are affected also by an invasive geranium from the Mediterranean
which is out-competing the butterfly's host plant. This is further aided by air pollution from Los angeles and San diego,
placed in areas the butterflies can colonize as climate shifts. So how is climate change affecting Earth's flora and fauna?
Almost two-thirds of species, including many birds, frogs, butterflies, trees and grassland flowers, breed or bloom earlier.
But we cannot be sure that global warming is the reason a local butterfly or wild flower species is becoming extinct or expanding northwards?
If you have data over a large area like our butterfly study of all of Europe3 then you can definitely say the northward shifts of two-thirds of European butterflies in the UK, France, Sweden,
Size doesn't always matter for peacocks: Nature Newsthe sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, Charles darwin wrote in 1860,
makes me sick. The seemingly useless, even cumbersome, gaudy plumage did not fit with his theory of natural selection, in
But Darwin eventually made peace with the peacock's train, and its plumage has become the poster child for his theory of sexual selection, in
Research in which peacocks'tails were plucked experimentally, published online this month in Animal Behaviour1, now suggests that the answer is yes but only sometimes.
Dakin and a colleague, Robert Montgomerie, tracked three populations of feral peacocks and peahens during the spring breeding season,
Beginning in the 1980s, Marion Petrie, a behavioural ecologist at Newcastle University, UK, examined the role of the peacock's tail in mating rituals.
I started to work on peacocks because Darwin had suggested it, and nobody had gone out and tested the idea,
I think there's clear evidence that peahens use a peacock's tail in their mate choice,
We propose that the peacock's train is an obsolete signal for which female preference has already been lost
Dakin repeated Petrie's experimental work by plucking the feathers of peacocks. She noticed a drop in their success with peahens.
and peacocks that manage to hold onto their plumes are likely to be the healthiest and fittest.
short DNA sequences that uniquely identify a species. Bar-coding makes it possible to distinguish between two species of butterfly, for example,
Maurice Leponce, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciencesa"blushing phantom butterfly, Cithaerias pireta, rests briefly on a palm leaf in San Lorenzo forest.
and moths, says Robert Raguso, a chemical ecologist also at Cornell. We don t know if they can perceive charge differentials,
The Xerces Blue butterfly disappeared with the sand dunes from San francisco in the 1940s as that city swelled.
After the 2003 heatwave, caterpillars devastated Mediterranean oak forests near Montpellier in France. Researchers have presumed that this triggered a large carbon release
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,
butterflies and moths showed clear movements to higher latitudes, whereas viruses and nematode worms shifted to lower latitudes.
and time-intensive field work according to a new study of the pine processionary moth a pest that destroys pine and cedar trees.
The caterpillars make distinctive highly visible silk nests in the trees they live in so they are relatively easy to track from afar.
The researchers from France's National Institute of Agronomic Research found that in a region of 18000 square miles in France where the caterpillars had set up shop data collected by examining Google street view was 96 percent as accurate as traditional field
Nor would Street view be a good way to track all species. Evidence of the pine processionary moth's habitat is highly visible from tree-lined roads
since his theory of evolution couldn't completely explain them (The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail
since his theory of evolution couldn t completely explain them (âÂ#Âoethe sight of a feather in a peacock s tail
therefore peacocks that can maintain such a display basically say: Look at me. Even with diminished immunity I can maintain this beautiful exterior.
because it is highly effective at controlling Lepidoptera larvae caterpillars. It is during the larval stage
when most of the damage by European corn borer occurs. The protein is very selective generally not harming insects in other orders (such as beetles flies bees and wasps.
and butterflies are also in decline. The bears without access to the fruit they'd normally be eating have to eat more meat
and keep it in a vase for a few days but you can't exactly do the same with say a caterpillar leg.
The glucosinolates seemed to discourage caterpillars from munching on leaves. Plants grown in light-dark cycles that matched the caterpillars'got munched on less than plants grown in light-dark cycles that didn't match the caterpillars'.
'That's because the out-of-sync plants thought it was night when the insects thought it was day so the plants weren't making as much glucosinolates as they would during the day
Caterpillars ate 20 percent more of out-of-sync cabbage leaves than they did of in-sync cabbage leaves Caterpillars also ate more of cabbage leaves that were kept in constant light
The hungry hungry caterpillar-repelling effect worked for about a week after the cabbage was harvested the biologists discovered.
This can result in moths that appear to change color over generations . or Birds with varying beak lengths that vary from island to island contingent on available food source.
But the moth is still a moth-the bird is still a bird. The fossil record does not support enough transitional species to date.
#Pest In Brazil Has evolved Resistance Against GMO Corncrop-munching caterpillars in Brazil are no longer put off by genetically modified plants designed to kill them Reuters reports.
and the pest in question is the Spodoptera frugiperda which is native to tropical regions of The americas.
*P. S. What about the butterflies?!:Most non-scientist Americans first learned about Bt corn when a study came out finding that pollen from the corn may kill caterpillars of the monarch butterfly.
Later studies have found that Bt corn doesn't significantly affect the numbers of monarch butterflies
although other modern farming practices may. Reuters i
#MERS Virus May be Able To Spread Through The Air Research strongly suggests that camels carry Middle east Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) a viral illness that has sickened nearly 700
The initiative doesn't only focus on bees but also addresses other pollinators like butterflies. The Federal government will also work to restore the Monarch butterfly migration using research
and habitat improvements that will benefit Monarchs as well as other native pollinators and honey bees the statement said.
and is one of the most biodiverse places On earth with for example more than 1200 butterfly species alone.
Six months earlier while researching butterfly diversity Reeves discovered a similar spider in the jungles of the Philippines that likewise makes spider-shaped decoys in its web albeit of a slightly different shape.
I have for stepping on a butterfly I know is going to lay the eggs that make the worms that eat up my cabbages.
Charles Ellington a Cambridge zoologist and former Weis-Fogh student built a robotic wing that could precisely mimic the movements of a hawk moth.
#Corn pest decline may save farmers moneypopulations of European corn borer (ECB) a major corn crop pest have declined significantly in the eastern United states according to Penn State researchers.
During September of each season they assessed corn borer damage on 400 random plants at each site.
and other moth species and provides data about their prevalence. While traps within the Pestwatch network provide insight on ECB population size where moths are active
and periods of ECB activity their utility as a predictive tool particularly for field corn has been limited Bohnenblust said.
We found that ECB moths captured in the Pestwatch network correlate well with in-field populations of ECB in field corn which means that Pestwatch data hold potential to inform decisions about
and Pestwatch reflects low moth captures in their area we would recommend that in the next season they give competitive non-Bt hybrids a try on some of their acres
The Diamondback Moth invaded Canada a long time ago and brought with it an appetite for crops such as cabbage and canola.
Researchers have known for years that two Canadian wasp species can kill the pest moth. The wasps lay their eggs in moth caterpillars then the baby wasps grow up eating the caterpillar from the inside out until the wasps emerge from the caterpillar killing the caterpillar in the process.
It's kind of like the movie Alien Young explained. While researchers knew these wasps kill the moth pest they didn't know which wasp was more effective under different conditions.
Young designed and performed experiments to see which wasp is better at controlling Diamondback Moth populations under various conditions.
He found that one wasp species was a tireless killing machine whereas the other wasp was only effective at killing moths under limited conditions.
The results will help farmers and greenhouse operators combat the moth pest without the need for pesticides.
My research won first prize at the Ottawa regional science fair and two of the judges were editors of The Canadian Field-Naturalist.
#New rearing method may help control western bean cutwormthe western bean cutworm is a destructive insect pest of dry beans and corn.
However in an article in the Journal of Economic Entomology called Evaluation of Tolerance to Bacillus thuringiensis Toxins Among Laboratory-Reared Western Bean Cutworm (Lepidoptera:
Noctuidae) the authors report a new rearing methodology used to maintain a laboratory colony for 12 continuous generations.
The new rearing procedure described in the article allowed the researchers to gather the first reported data for western bean cutworm susceptibility to Cry toxins using laboratory dose-response bioassays.
With the ability to rear western bean cutworm in the laboratory it may be possible in the future to select strains with varying levels of Cry1f toxin susceptibilities which could in turn be used to investigate the genetic basis of resistance.
While Bt corn has been highly effective against the European corn borer it has been less so against the western corn rootworm
Aaron Gassmann (Iowa State university) Michael Gray (University of Illinois) Eileen Cullen (University of Wisconsin) and Bruce Hibbard (University of Missouri) examine why Bt corn has been more effective against the European corn borer
First Bt proteins intended for the European corn borer are produced at a higher dose than the ones intended for rootworms;
this ensures that fewer corn borers are likely to survive which lowers the chances of them producing offspring that may be resistant.
Second corn borer moths travel farther before mating which increases the chances of potentially resistant insects mating with non-resistant ones that have not been exposed to Bt proteins;
Land management as a key to countering butterfly declinescurrently butterfly populations in many countries decline at alarming rates.
therefore have far-reaching consequences for the success and persistence of the butterfly fauna. A research team from Sweden and Germany have reviewed now effects of land management on butterfly diversity using historical and current surveys during the last 100 years.
The study focuses on systematic surveys of butterfly population trends and extinction rates in southern Swedish agricultural landscapes.
In some areas half of the butterfly fauna has been lost during the last 60-100 years.
The study is published in the journal Nature Conservation. Land use in these parts of Northern europe has changed markedly with key butterfly habitats such as hay meadows disappearing at alarming rates.
Grazed mixed open woodlands have been transformed into dense forests and domestic grazers have been relocated from woodlands to arable fields and semi-natural grasslands.
Adding to these problems current agricultural subsidy systems favour intensive grazing on the remaining semi-natural grasslands with strong negative effects on butterfly diversity.
and land use are problematic for the butterfly fauna relatively minor adjustments to land management have a potential of drastically counteracting these effects.
and to work towards recovery of threatened butterfly populations the review ends by recommending twelve management measures favourable for many butterflies.
#Green flame moths: Scientists discover two new Limacodidae species from China and Taiwanthe representatives of the Limacodidae moth family are widely known as slug moths due to the resemblance of their stunningly colored caterpillars to slug species. Within this popular family the Parasa undulata group is perhaps one of the most intriguing due to the beautiful
green wing pattern typical for those species. In a recent revision published in the open access journal Zookeys scientists describe two new species from the group
and provide a first record of a conifer-feeding caterpillar. The two new species Parasa viridiflamma and Parasa minwangi described from China
The scientists provide the first record of a caterpillar from the group feeding exclusively on pine trees Picea morrisonicola in Taiwan.
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