All Articles Tagged As: insects
 | The bacterium that causes Lyme disease, the fastest growing vector-borne disease in North America, originated in Europe before the Ice Age ...> Full Article |
 | Researchers have shed light on a paradox of the evolutionary process that has existed since Darwin's time, why individuals will rear their siblings rather then reproduce themselves? ...> Full Article |
 | Like any species that aspires to rule the world, the honey bee, Apis mellifera, invades new territories in repeated assaults. A new study demonstrates that when these honey bees arrive in a place that has already been invaded, the newcomers benefit from the genetic endowment of their predecessors. ...> Full Article |
 | Among humans, making yourself smell more alluring than you really are is a fairly harmless, socially accepted habit that maintains a complete perfume industry. However, it is a matter of life and death for caterpillars of large blue butterflies that dupe ant workers into believing them to be one of the ant's own larvae. ...> Full Article |
The January 2008 issue of BioScience includes an article by biologist Edward O. Wilson that argues for a new perspective on the evolution of advanced social organization in some ants, bees, and wasps (Hymenoptera).
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 | Most modern-day groups of beetles have been around since the time of the dinosaurs and have been diversifying ever since. ...> Full Article |
 | The complex organisation of some insect societies is thought to have developed to such a level that these animals can no longer survive on their own. New research suggests that rather than organisational, genetic, or biological complexity defining a 'point of no return' for social living, pressures of predation create advantages to not living alone. ...> Full Article |
 | A type of beetle that lives its entire life burrowing through stored grain has been found to lack full colour vision, and what's more the vision it does have breaks the rules. Most other insects have trichromatic vision -- they are sensitive to ultraviolet, blue and long wavelength light. Scientists now reveal that this beetle has lost photoreceptors that are sensitive to blue wavelengths. ...> Full Article |
 | When termites are chewing on your home, your immediate thought probably isn't "I wonder how they digest that stuff?" But biologists have been gnawing on the question for more than a century. The key is not just the termite, but what lives in its gut. A multitude of genes from the microbes populating the hindgut of a termite have been sequenced and analyzed, and the findings reported today in the journal Nature. ...> Full Article |
 | Moths and butterflies, particularly silkworms, are well known producers of silk. And we all know spiders use it for their webs. But they are not the only invertebrates who make use of the strength and versatility of silk. ...> Full Article |
The complete genomes of 12 related species of the fly Drosophila are published this week in the journal Nature. One of the 12, Drosophila melanogaster, is widely used in studies of genetics and development, and its genome was published in 2000. The new work refines understanding of fruit fly genomics, but it also has implications for understanding the human genome.
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New insights into the evolutionary relationship between plant-dwelling insects and their parasites are revealed in the online open access journal BMC Biology. Researchers shed light on how sawflies evolved to escape their parasites and gain themselves an 'enemy-free space' for millions of years.
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 | The genes that make a fruit fly's eyes red also produce red wing patterns in the Heliconius butterfly found in South and Central America, finds a new study by a UC Irvine entomologist. ...> Full Article |
 | Primitive Plants Use Heat and Odor to Woo Pollinating Insects ...> Full Article |
 | Researchers have used an innovative approach to reveal the molecular basis of altruistic behavior in wasps. The research team focused on the expression of behavior-related genes in Polistes metricus paper wasps, a species for which little genetic data was available when the study was begun. ...> Full Article |
 | When the larvae of the primitive social insect Polistes metricus, a paper wasp, slips into the quiet pupal stage, she doesn't know if she'll arise a worker or gyne (future queen) -- unless she consults with Arizona State University's social insect researcher Gro Amdam. ...> Full Article |
 | A light-emitting strain of bacteria and a nematode worm, which work together to prey on soil-dwelling insects, use insecticidal toxins to kill their insect hosts. Scientists speaking at the Society for General Microbiology's 161st Meeting are now investigating the potential role of these toxins in bacteria pathogenic to humans. ...> Full Article |
 | It appears that chemical warfare has been around a lot longer than poison arrows, mustard gas or nerve weapons -- about 100 million years, give or take a little. ...> Full Article |
 | The mating ritual of the honey bee is a mysterious affair, occurring at dizzying heights in zones identifiable only to a queen and the horde of drones that court her. Now a research team led by the University of Illinois has identified an odorant receptor that allows male drones to find a queen in flight. The receptor, on the male antennae, can detect an available queen up to 60 meters away. ...> Full Article |
 | Fruit flies like a little seltzer in their drinks, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. ...> Full Article |
 | Biologists at Harvard University have identified the ancient fossilized remains of a pollen-bearing bee as the first hint of orchids in the fossil record, a find they say suggests orchids are old enough to have coexisted with dinosaurs. ...> Full Article |
 | Female beetles mate to quench their thirst according to new research by a scientist from the University of Exeter's School of Biosciences. The males of some insect species, including certain types of beetles, moths and crickets, produce unusually large ejaculates, which in some cases can account for around 10% of their body weight. The study shows that dehydrated females can accept sexual invitations simply to get hold of the water in the seminal fluid. ...> Full Article |
 | New findings from insect studies at Queen's and U of T may help to protect our brains from extremely high fevers that sometimes trigger seizures, particularly in infants and small children. ...> Full Article |
 | Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have cast new light on why the giant insects that lived millions of years ago disappeared. ...> Full Article |
 | Studies of desert duo show there's more to life than predator eats prey ...> Full Article |
 | Alexander Kaiser, Ph.D., of Midwestern University's Department of Pharmacology, Division of Basic Sciences, was the lead author in a recent study to help determine why insects, once dramatically larger than they are today, have seen such a remarkable reduction in size over the course of history. ...> Full Article |
 | The luscious aroma of flowers attracts lovers, and the biological role of that smell is similar: to attract pollinators. "Plants need to attract insects, bats and hummingbirds to transfer the pollen and create fertile seeds," says Hugh Iltis, professor emeritus of botany at UW-Madison. ...> Full Article |
 | With the aid of a $530,000, three-year National Science Foundation grant, Indiana University Bloomington biologist Armin Moczek will continue his research into the origin and diversification of beetle horns. Horned beetles are increasingly being recognized as a new model system in evolutionary and developmental biology, and this is the second NSF grant given to Moczek to further develop his study system. ...> Full Article |
 | Why do queen honeybees mate with dozens of males? Does their extreme promiscuity, perhaps, serve a purpose? ...> Full Article |
Unique technology that uses the enzymes of fireflies to read the genetic code of DNA has been installed at the University of Liverpool.
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 | An international team of researchers has documented a remarkable example of natural selection in a tropical butterfly species that fought back - genetically speaking - against a highly invasive, male-killing bacteria. ...> Full Article |
 | With nearly one million classified and named species, the insecta clade is the most diverse group of higher organisms on earth in terms of category, behavior, physiology and genetics. Although scientists have discovered that this high divergence results from the organism's adaptation to the environment and its long-time evolution over the past 400 million years, the reason and genetic mechanisms behind it remain unclear. Furthermore, despite the findings that proteins specific to the insect are the major future to distinguish it from others, people are not clear what they are. ...> Full Article |
 | Ancient Greenland was green. New Danish research has shown that it was covered in conifer forest and had a relatively mild climate. Professor Eske Willerslev has analysed the world's oldest DNA, preserved under the kilometre-thick icecap. The DNA is likely close to half a million years old, and the research results are overturning all previous assumptions about biological life and the climate in Greenland. The results have just been published in Science. ...> Full Article |
 | Large jaws are efficient in crushing hard prey, whereas small jaws are functional in capturing elusive prey. Researchers have suggested that such trade-offs between "force" and "velocity" could cause evolutionary diversification of morphology in animals such as birds, fish, and salamanders. Junji Konuma and Satoshi Chiba of Tohoku University found that a new trade-off exists in animal feeding behavior. The team suggests that diversification of carabid beetles could be caused by a "force" and "fit" trade-off. ...> Full Article |
 | A hundred years since Russian microbiologist Elie Metschnikow first discovered the invertebrate immune system, scientists are only just beginning to understand its complexity. Presenting their findings at a recent European Science Foundation (ESF) conference, scientists showed that invertebrates have evolved elaborate ways to fight disease. ...> Full Article |
 | Understanding how the immune system evolved in insects can help scientists gain new insight into human response to infection, says an Iowa State University entomologist. ...> Full Article |
The coming summer vibrates with expressions of insect love and desire. The cicada's songs or the butterflies' bright colours are examples of how an emitting sex attracts conspecific members of the responding sex. Moth odours (pheromones), though less conspicuous for us humans, are also signals by which females guide males towards them, even on the darkest nights. Such mating recognition systems tend to be very specific, hence they are thought to play a major role in the evolution of mating barriers and in the formation of new species.
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 | How social or altruistic behavior evolved has been a central and hotly debated question, particularly by those researchers engaged in the study of social insect societies of ants, bees and wasps. ...> Full Article |
 | Many insects living in northern climates don't die at the first signs of cold weather. Rather, new research suggests that they use a number of specialized proteins to survive the chilly months. ...> Full Article |
While in Thailand, a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher found a treasure-trove of previously unknown information about aquatic insects in the country. In the process, he learned firsthand that a few of these little critters pack quite a punch when they bite.
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Coleoptera (beetles) are one of the most successful groups of organisms on Earth. Their success in evolutionary terms is recognised by their extreme adaptive diversity (occupying almost every possible ecological niche) and their longevity (fossils from the Palaeozoic, 280 million years ago). But most of all, their success is indisputable in their sheer species numbers: with over 350,000 named species and many more to be described, they constitute about one fourth of all species on the Planet!
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J. B. S. Haldane once famously quipped that "God is inordinately fond of beetles." Results of a study by Mark A. McPeek of Dartmouth College and Jonathan M. Brown of Grinnell College suggest that this fondness was expressed not by making so many, but rather by allowing them to persist for so long.
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