News by Subject Biology

Legless gall midge larvae (maggots) that emerge early from their gall homes have an amazing escape strategy; they leap despite their lack of limbs. Curling its body into a loop, each maggot presses down on the rear portion of its body, which forms an improvised limb that presses on the ground to propel the creature into the air. In addition, leaping is 28 times more efficient than crawling over the same distance.

A system created in Brazil using cheap, biodegradable materials permits controlled release of larvicide and can be used in small amounts of water.

A new paper in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry reveals that adjuvants, chemicals commonly added to pesticides, amplify toxicity affecting mortality rates, flight intensity, colony intensity, and pupae development in honey bees.

It is difficult to distinguish caterpillars of the peppered moth from a twig. The caterpillars not only mimic the form but also the color of a twig. In a new study, researchers of Liverpool University in the UK and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany demonstrate that the caterpillars can sense the twig's color with their skin.

Research by the John Innes Centre and Stanford University opens the door to azadirachtin production.

Infections such as Chagas disease, African sleeping sickness, and leishmaniasis are caused by a group of microorganisms called kinetoplastids. In a new study, a research team from Penn and Penn State Brandywine used a non-disease-causing kinetoplastid to investigate how these parasites adhere to their insect hosts' insides. Their findings could help in the development of targeted therapies that prevent insects from transmitting these diseases to humans.

Largely relying on DNA barcoding, rather than traditional practices, a simplified diagnostics method for species description could be the key to revealing Earth's biodiversity before much of it goes extinct. Proposed by a US-Canadian research team in a new publication in the open-access journal Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift, the approach is demonstrated in practice with the description of 18 new to science species of parasitic wasps, recently discovered from the Área de Conservación Guanacaste, Costa Rica.

The fact that millions of North American monarch butterflies fly thousands of miles each fall and somehow manage to find the same overwintering sites in central Mexican forests and along the California coast, year after year, is pretty mind-blowing.