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a trend it shares with other perilous beasts from wasps to snakes. And it occurs to me,

whose favourite is fried wasp oevery crispy and a nice light snack. oebut this is crazy when most Asians are lactose intolerant.

Modern insects like bees and wasps rely on flowers for nectar and pollen. oethe fossil record suggests that a lot of these insect groups originated before angiosperms appeared,

#Punishment Important in Plant-Pollinator Relationship Charlotte Jander placed either a wasp carrying pollen or a pollen-free wasp in a bag around a fig fruit.

Figs and the wasps that pollinate them present one of biologists favorite examples of a beneficial relationship between two different species. In exchange for the pollination service provided by the wasp,

and board for the wasps developing young. However, wasps do not always pollinate the fig.

Fig trees oepunish these oecheaters by dropping unpollinated fruit, killing the wasps offspring inside, report researchers working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Their results published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, show that sanctions against cheaters may be critical to maintain the relationship. oerelationships require give and take.

and their wasp pollinators. said lead author, Charlotte Jandr, graduate student in Cornell Universitys Department of Neurobiology and Behavior,

who conducted the study as a Smithsonian pre-doctoral fellow. oewhat prevents the wasps from reaping the benefits of the relationship without paying the costs?

Some wasp species passively carry pollen that sticks to their bodies. Others actively collect pollen in special pouches.

Jandr evaluated the ability of six different fig tree-fig wasp species pairs to regulate cheating.

She introduced either a single pollen-free wasp, or a wasp carrying pollen, into a mesh bag containing an unpollinated The wasps entered the figs to lay their eggs.

Jandr found that trees often dropped unpollinated figs before young wasps could mature. oethis is really about the all too-human theme of crime and punishment.

We found that in actively pollinated fig species when wasps expend time and energy to collect

and deposit pollenwasps that did not provide the basic service of pollination were sanctioned. However in passively pollinated species

when the wasps do need not to make an effort to pollinateanctions were said absent Allen Herre,

STRI staff scientist. oealthough we still need to clearly understand the costs associated with applying sanctions,

However, a tiny parasitic wasp from Asia known as a Trissolcus wasp#a bug smaller than a gnat#is showing promise as a possible biological control.

These wasps, which are natural enemies of the brown marmorated stink bug in Asia, might be able to nip the stink bug explosion in the bud by preying on brown marmorated stink bug eggs, the only type of eggs that species of wasps eats.

Hoelmer says that research is underway to determine whether it will be safe to release this specific species of wasp into the wild in the USA:

We already know that each species of Trissolcus only recognizes certain kinds of stink bugs as suitable food for their offspring.

However, we want to be sure that any wasps that are released to control the brown marmorated stink bug will not create problems for other stink bugs,

Above, a wasp is infected by a Cordyceps fungus species that hasnt yet been named or formally documented.

and found that it is the same species that has previously been documented to parasitizie bumblebee as well as paper wasp populations.

wasps and ants are popular too, accounting for a whopping 14%global insect consumption. Cicadas, locusts, crickets, dragonflies, flies are spared not either.

when the cause simply wasn't cool earning the moniker Green Hornet for his support of environmental causes.

and wasps evolved at about the same time as the angiosperms. It was cited frequently as an example of co-evolution.

-or wasp-like insects built hive-like nests in what is called now the Petrified Forest.

when parasitic wasps are hanging around said Todd Schlenke an Emory researcher who wasn't involved in the review paper.

In the flies increased blood-alcohol content causes the wasp maggot parasites living in their blood to die in a particularly gruesome way by having their internal organs evert outside their bodies through their anuses Schlenke told Livescience.

When parasitic wasps are scarce the flies prefer to lay their eggs in less fermented fruit.

yellow jacket wasp larvae in Japan; and grasshoppers known as chapulines in Oaxaca Mexico to name a few.

and creases is perfect for creating a hive of pumpkin wasps. PHOTOS: Autumn Colors The Haunted Pumpkin Garden will also display four other ginormous pumpkins which Villafane

Beetles wasps grasshoppers and other insects are very efficient at converting the food they eat into body mass take up very little space

#Transparent Snails &'Fairy'Wasps: Top 10 New Species Revealed A fuzzy-faced tree-living carnivore a transparent snail

A world away but seemingly from the same tale is Tinkerbella nana an unbelievably small parasitoid wasp with feathery delicate wings.

The wasp measures only 0. 00984 inches (250 micrometers) long and is part of a family called fairyflies.

(and killer bees) wasps ants and other bugs Berenbaum said. It's hard to pin down specific data on the number of people attacked annually in the United states by Africanized honeybees:

Other finds include ants beetles wasps midges and mammal hair all crowded together in the amber fragments offering a rich view of the 20-million-year-old forest ecosystem.

The protein is very selective generally not harming insects in other orders (such as beetles flies bees and wasps.

and they look like black wasps so they scare the neighbors for a bonus! You can then use the chicken manure to fertilize duckweed ponds use the duckweed to feed tilapia filter the tilapia water thru a gravel growbed use the gravel growbed to grow vegetables

and circumstance didn't allow for studying silk-henge small webby towers built by an as yet-unknown type of spider perhaps to defend eggs against wasps).

The british Forces have begun recently using a microdrone a hand-launched helicopter called the Black Hornet to scout for insurgents in Afghanistan.

#Teens publish studies on pest-killing wasps, berry funguswe know more about wildlife this week thanks to research by two Canadian teens.

Their research on wasps and leaf disease reveal that a Canadian wasp is an efficient killer of an agricultural pest

Young's research focused on an agricultural pest and the wasps that kill it. The Diamondback Moth invaded Canada a long time ago

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.

and are less aggressive than honeybees or wasps. They are appreciated very much by farmers as keen pollen collectors.

#Ancient fig wasp lived tens of millions of years before figsa 115-million-year-old fossilized wasp from northeast Brazil presents a baffling puzzle to researchers.

The wasp's ovipositor the organ through which it lays its eggs looks a lot like those of present-day wasps that lay their eggs in figs.

The problem researchers say is that figs arose about 65 million years after this wasp was alive.

The wasp belongs to the Hymenoptera superfamily known as Chalcidoidea which parasitize other insects spiders and some plants.

and is estimated to contain up to 500000 species. This is a tiny parasitic wasp it's the smallest fossil wasp found in this particular deposit

and it's the oldest representative of its family said Sam Heads a paleoentomologist at the Illinois Natural history Survey at the University of Illinois. More importantly it's possible that this wasp was associated fig

The presence of a wasp with an ovipositor that looks like those used by fig wasps today is not hard evidence that figs were around in the fossil wasp's day--a time of dinosaurs Heads said.

and this wasp was parasitizing whatever that was. This could be an example of convergent evolution where separate species independently evolve similar traits he said.

Or the fossil wasp could be the ancestor of the fig wasp and its ovipositor first adapted to a plant or fruit that was around long before the fig later found a use in figs.

because parasitoid wasps feeding on the larvae of Drosophila avoid citrus fruits. The same smell that is attractive to the flies also repels the wasps.

The scientists used imaging techniques to visualize the activity in certain areas of the flies brains

#In nature a considerable proportion of Drosophila larvae are killed by enemies mainly parasitoid wasps that lay their eggs inside the larvae.

It is astonishing that these wasps are repelled by citrus odours although citrus should guide them to their food source:

The parasitoid wasp Leptopilina boulardii which specializes in Drosophila melanogaster is repelled by valencene. In a further choice experiment the wasps had to choose larvae from two substrates one with valencene

and one without and they clearly preferred the larvae on the valencene-free substrate. It is still unknown why the wasps avoid citrus.

However it is certain that female fruit flies have learned to let their offspring grow on citrus fruits

A recent survey by Mr Abhineshwar Prasad of The University of the South Pacific reported over 100 species of arthropods associated with road side patches of S. trilobata including Hymenoptera such as parasitoid wasps

Ants more closely related to bees than to most waspsants and bees are surprisingly more genetically related to each other than they are to social wasps such as yellow jackets

and paper wasps a team of University of California Davis scientists has discovered. The groundbreaking research is available online

and bees were related more distantly with ants being closer to certain parasitoid wasps. Ants bees and stinging wasps all belong to the aculeate (stinging) Hymenoptera clade--the insect group in which social behavior is developed most extensively said senior author

and ant specialist Phil Ward professor of entomology at UC Davis. Despite great interest in the ecology and behavior of these insects their evolutionary relationships have never been clarified fully.

and wasps Ward said. We were able to resolve this question by employing next-generation sequencing technology and advances in bioinformatics.

--and genomic (DNA) data from a number of species of ants bees and wasps including bradynobaenid wasps a cuckoo wasp a spider wasp a scoliid wasp a mud dauber wasp a tiphiid wasp

a paper wasp and a pollen wasp; a velvet ant (wasp; a dracula ant; and a sweat bee Lasioglossum albipes.

Of particular interest was the finding that ants are a sister group to the Apoidea a major group within Hymenoptera that includes bees

and sphecid wasps (a family of wasps that includes digger wasps and mud daubers). The UC Davis results also provide a new perspective on lower Cretaceous fossil Cariridris bipetiolata originally claimed to be the oldest fossil ant.

Scientists later reinterpreted it to be a spheciform wasp. Our discovery that ants and apoids are sister taxa helps to explain difficulty in the placement of Cariridris the authors wrote in the paper

The scientists discovered that the ancestral aculeate wasp was likely an ectoparasitoid which attacks and paralyzes a host insect

-looking Asian Giant hornet Vespa tropica and a smaller hornet species known as Vespa velutina which has invaded Europe

and now poses a threat to European honey bees. The Asian Giant hornets are armored dangerous heavily predators says Ken Tan the first author of the paper who also works at the Chinese Academy of Science's Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden.

Bee colonies respond by forming balls of defending bees encasing the hornet and in some cases cooking it to death with heat generated by the bees.

The researchers found that bees treated the bigger hornet species which is four times more massive than the smaller species as more dangerous.

In a series of experiments they presented bees with different combinations of safe and dangerous feeders--depending on their association with the larger

or smaller hornets--containing varying concentrations of sucrose. Bees avoided the dangerous feeders and preferred feeders that provided sweeter nectar says Nieh.

They avoided the giant hornet at the best food but continued to visit the lower quality food with the smaller hornet.

Other scientists involved in the research were Zongwen Hu Weiwen Chen Zhengwei Wang and Yuchong Wang all of the Eastern Bee Research Institute of Yunnan Agricultural University.

Such perspectives could include a more diverse array of toxins for the control of pest populations possibly supplemented with a biological component such as pathogenic fungi or parasitic wasps.

Set aside the fact that the honeybee's cousins--hornets wasps and yellow jackets--actually account for most stings said Richard Fell Ph d

. Despite years of intensive research scientists do not understand the cause nor can they provide remedies for

A team of researchers from Switzerland found that the odor released by maize plants under attack by insects attract not only parasitic wasps

These volatile organic compounds are known to be attractive to parasitoid wasps that lay their eggs inside other insects killing them Plants appear to use this strategy to fight back against herbivorous insects by calling for their enemies'enemies.

and the United states used historical and contemporary records of species'presence held by organizations including the European Invertebrate Survey Butterfly Conservation the Bees Wasps and Ants Recording Society the INBO Research Institute

#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.

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?

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.

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

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.

which is a group with similar characteristics to that of bees and wasps but with a different taxonomic order.

but new research says the aroma also summons beneficial insects to the rescue. â#oewhen there is need for protection the plant signals the environment via the emission of volatile organic compounds which are recognized as a feeding queue for parasitic wasps to come to the plant that is being eaten

And thatâ##s when they observed that the parasitic wasps didnâ##t pay attention to plants without the green leaf volatile. â#oethere are actually two roles for this moleculeâ#he said. â#oefirst it activates the jasmonate hormone

Then this molecule since it is a volatile attracts parasitic wasps. They come to the plant that is being chewed up by insect herbivores

when you delete these volatiles parasitic wasps are attracted no longer to that planteven when an insect chews on the leaf.

because they send an SOS-type signal that results in attraction of parasitic wasps. â#Kolomiets tested the phenomena both in the lab

or each month and using biological control agents such as tiny parasitoid wasps. Genetic mutations are random

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.

Costa rica The tiny size and delicately fringed wings of the parasitoid wasp family Mymaridae led to their common name:

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

It may give flies wasps and other predators greater opportunities to attack undefended eggs and larvae.

which include bees ants sawflies and wasps. One of the starkest examples of this division of labor is the development of castes

and wasps a project involving numerous citizen scientists. The nest boxes are located in Toronto and the surrounding region in backyards community gardens

#Wasps use ancient aggression genes to create social groupsaggression-causing genes appeared early in animal evolution

Specifically we looked at aggressive behavior in wasps bees fruit flies and mice and found a few genes that are associated consistently with aggression.

The team investigated the expression of aggression genes in the brains and ovaries of paper wasps--Polistes metricus.

Specifically they looked at wasps belonging to different castes including dominant colony-founding queens subordinate colony-founding queens established queens dominant workers and subordinate workers.

The team then compared the wasp results to gene expression data already available in honey bees fruit flies and mice.

We found that in wasps which are primitively social insects aggression genes control the establishment of an individual's dominance over a group said Christina Grozinger professor of entomology and director of the Center for Pollinator Research Penn State.

We found that the most important influence on expression of genes in the brains of paper wasps was external factors such as the season

Can we create hyper-aggressive wasps? This type of question allows us to go beyond correlation between the gene and the behavior and address causation.

Grozinger added If there are hyper-aggressive wasps what effect does that have on wasp society? Story Source:

The above story is provided based on materials by Penn State. The original article was written by Sara Lajeunesse.

In 2011 for the first time entomologists at the University of California Riverside released Tamarixia radiata a wasp that is the natural enemy of the ACP in a citrus grove in Riverside to help control the psyllid.

But is this wasp safe to use? Does its introduction pose any risk to the environment?

The results are important as the wasp is being used for ACP biological control in Florida Texas the Caribbean Central and South america and Mexico.

To test the safety of Tamarixia different species of native California psyllids were exposed to the wasp in a series of tests.

The tests were designed to give the wasp a choice between ACP and a non-target psyllid speices or there was no choice (that is the wasp was given only access to a non-target species one it had evolved not with).

When given a choice Tamarixia overwhelming attacked ACP the researchers found. In only one instance was a non-target species attacked at very low rates--less than 5 percent Hoddle said.

and to discover that the Pakistani wasp will be a good natural enemy to use in California for the biological control of ACP.

and showed that naturally-occurring pest controlling wasps are not able to restrict the moth's impact.

The results reveal that the tiny pest controllers('parasitiod'wasps) that prey upon the caterpillars are not present in high enough numbers to control the moths.

Honey bees often get mistaken for the European wasp. The two behave and want totally different things,

This is a big problem as the European wasp is very aggressive and gives our poor honey bee a bad name.