Natural enemy composition rather than richness determines pest suppression

Natural enemy interactions constrain pest control in complex agricultural landscapes.

Biological control of pests by natural enemies is a major ecosystem service delivered to agriculture worldwide. Quantifying and predicting its effectiveness at large spatial scales is critical for increased sustainability of agricultural production. Landscape complexity is known to benefit natural enemies, but its effects on interactions between natural enemies and the consequences for crop dam...

Dual Defense: Pest-resistant Turf and Natural Enemy Interactions

Heart disease risk determines menopausal age rather than the reverse.

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to investigate whether a harmful cardiovascular risk profile accelerates menopause. BACKGROUND Women with an early menopause are at an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Although increased cardiovascular risk has been proposed as consequence of menopause, the alternative hypothesis, that increased premenopausal cardiovascular risk promotes early...

Theoretical Study of Pest Control Using Stage Structured Natural Enemies with Maturation Delay: A Crop-Pest-Natural Enemy Model

In the natural world, there are many insect species whose individual members have a life history that takes them through two stages, immature and mature. Moreover, the rates of survival, development, and reproduction almost always depend on age, size, or development stage. Keeping this in mind, in this paper, a three species crop-pest-natural enemy food chain model with two stages for natural e...

Continuous Flash Suppression: Stimulus Fractionation rather than Integration.

Recent studies using continuous flash suppression suggest that invisible stimuli are processed as integrated, semantic entities. We challenge the viability of this account, given recent findings on the neural basis of interocular suppression and replication failures of high-profile CFS studies. We conclude that CFS reveals stimulus fractionation in visual cortex.