Post oak grasshoppers emerging
...ental stages before becoming adults, all the while munching on leaves. Currently, they are still in the pre-adult stage, he said. The grasshoppers prefer post oaks, but Behmer has heard reports of them feeding on other oak and hickory trees, even defoliating them. To help him find out more about these p...Scientists find genes involved in the battle between Hessian flies and wheat
...ins that wheat produces to protect itself from the munching larvae. The researchers report their findings in the Feb. 6 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Richard Shukle, a USDA-ARS entomologist and Purdue adjunct assistant professor, is working with colleagues to learn mo...When the going gets tough, slime molds start synthesizing
...old Dictyostelium discoideum leads a solitary life munching on bacteria littering the forest floor. But these simple creatures can perform heroic developmental acts: when the bacterial food supply dries up, Dictyostelium amebas band together with their neighbors and form a multi-cellular tower designed to sav...Brainstem blocks pain to protect key behaviors
...used just as intently on standard rat chow as when munching chocolate chips, yogurt drops or butter cookies. Although earlier studies found that eating took precedence over pain in food-deprived animals, this is the first study to show that feeding suppressed pain in well-fed animals. To understand the neural......day's Western society, large portions and frequent munching may lead insulin levels to remain high all the time. In that case, the liver no longer perceives pulses of the hormone and becomes resistant." The researchers found that insulin pulses acutely reduce the activity of fat-building fatty acid syntha...