Climate change isolates Rocky Mountain butterflies
... which may lead to the extinction of the colourful insects in some areas, says a new study from the Universit...s native to Rocky Mountain meadows, including some insects and rodents, will suffer "several consequences" if forests continue to expand unchecked. "Often f...X-ray images help explain limits to insect body size
...al Laboratory have cast new light on why the giant insects that lived millions of years ago disappeared. In...ospheric oxygen levels reaching record highs, some insects evolved into giants. When oxygen levels returned to lower levels, the insect giants went extinct. ...Swarming starlings help probe plasma, crowds and stock market
...the flocking behavior of large groups of birds and insects with information technology used to correlate info... colonies of bacteria or large groups of birds and insects such as flocking starlings or swarming locusts. The Warwick research team recognized that the patte...Tropical insects 'go the distance' to inform rainforest conservation
...ING, Mich. The long-held belief that plant-eating insects in tropical forests are picky eaters that stay clo...lenged by new research findings that suggest these insects feast on a broader menu of foliage and can be consistently found across hundreds of miles of tropica...Smithsonian scientists show differing patterns of rainforest biodiversity
...ver basins in Papua New Guinea. The team collected insects and plants from eight study sites across 75,000 sq...sity across the study area for all three groups of insects as well as for plants, indicating that species tend to be widespread and the biological communities ...Link between sunspots, rain helps predict disease in east Africa
...e. Because mosquitoes and other disease-carrying insects thrive in wet conditions, heavy rains may herald outbreaks of diseases such as Rift Valley Fever. The research relied on rainfall data going back a century. Historical records of water levels at lakes Victoria, Tanganyika, and Naivasha also demonst...In limiting life span, study finds booming bacteria innocent
...eir microbial infestations dont seem to hasten the insects toward death, according to a new study in the Augu...wers group said. The researchers showed that the insects exhibited dramatic increases in many types of bacteria during aging, both inside the body and on the...Chickadee, nutchatch presence in conifers increases tree growth, says CU-Boulder study
...may have implications for infestations by damaging insects like bark beetles that have ravaged pine forests i...ickadees act as tree protectors, keeping check the insects that can have deleterious effects on forest vigor." The birds in the study included the mountain ...Synthetic adhesive mimics sticking powers of gecko and mussel
... increase in adhesion force. Flies, bees and other insects also use this strategy. Many researchers before Messersmith have attempted to mimic the gecko foot but have had limited success in replicating the reversible property over many contact cycles. No synthetic mimics have been able to stick past two co...What determines the speed at which birds fly?
...peeds of a wide range of flyers, from the smallest insects to the largest aircraft. In a paper published this week in the open access journal PLoS Biology, Thomas Alerstam, Mikael Rosen, and colleagues from the University of Lund in Sweden analyze the flight speeds of 138 bird species and overturn the genera...Philadelphia ecologist receives top Mongolia honor
... also has conducted field surveys of fish, aquatic insects and rotifers (microscopic animals) in Mongolian waters that have yielded previously unknown species....Researchers witness natural selection at work in dramatic comeback of male butterflies
...s revealed some of the extraordinary ways in which insects adapt to the pressures inherent when nearly all its members are of one gender. Notably, Charlat and Hurst reported in an earlier study that, thanks to Wolbachia, when males of H. bolina, commonly known as the Blue Moon or Great Eggfly butterfly, be...Aphids make 'chemical weapons' to fight off killer ladybirds
... different groups of aphids. They found that those insects eating a diet rich in glucosinolates had a high su... of the mechanism with the chemical stored in the insects blood and the catalyst stored in its muscles means that in most cases the individual aphid responsi...Biocontrol of invasive water hyacinth contributes to socioeconomic and health improvements in Africa
...ategy integrated mechanical removal and use of two insects that are natural enemies of the weed--weevils in the genus Neochetina--N. bruchi and N. eichhorniae, both natives of South America. Dr. Ogwangs work on the Lake Victoria water hyacinth eradication program was recently featured on National Geograph...Elevated CO2 in atmosphere weakens defenses of soybeans to herbivores
... these beetles consumed the weakened soybeans, the insects invasive abilities were intensified. Dr. Jorge Z...ncreased the susceptibility of soybean to invasive insects by down-regulating the expression of hormones related with defense, which down-regulate the importan...Research ends debate over benefits of butterfly defenses
...ltogether. We can now apply this model to other insects that use mimicking techniques, giving us greater insight into why particular species evolve to resemble one another and change their behaviour....Oldest DNA ever recovered suggests earth was warmer than previously believed
...hick ice sheet and came from the trees, plants and insects of a boreal forest estimated to be between 450,000 and 900,000 years-old. Previously, the youngest evidence of a boreal forest in Greenland was from 2.4 million years ago. The results of the research were published today in the journal Science. "......xtract genetic traces of a long list of plants and insects and thereby reconstruct ancient plant and animal l...d. Furthermore Willerslev found genetic traces of insects such as butterflies, moths, flies and beetles. But when was that" According to most scientific theor......re may be no insect larvae. But there may be other insects in the area which can also provide clues. After ... where there is scant knowledge about necrophagous insects that exist and that colonise dead bodies, or about what their cycle of developments are and their di......comes to surviving in the wild with foliage eating insects preferring the taste of native plants, according t...erbivores, are involved. "While many plants need insects to reproduce there are many insects that simply feed off plants and this is having an effect on nati...