Interactions between plants and insect herbivores are important determinants of plant productivity in managed and natural vegetation. In response to attack, plants have evolved a range of defenses to reduce the threat of injury and loss of productivity. Crop losses from damage caused by arthropod pests can exceed 15% annually. Crop domestication and selection for improved yield and quality can ...

For many animals, chemosensation is essential for guiding social behavior. However, because multiple factors can modulate levels of individual chemical cues, deriving information about other individuals via natural chemical stimuli involves considerable challenges. How social information is extracted despite these sources of variability is poorly understood. The vomeronasal system provides an e...

to study the effect of drought stress during using organic and chemical fertilizers on morphological, agronomic traits and the essential oil of coriander, a field experiment was conducted as split plot based on randomized complete block design in three replications at agricultural research station, college of agriculture, university of torbat heydarieh, iran during growing season of 2010-2011. ...

In order to investigate the effect of urea, Azocompost and cutting on growth characteristics of Oregano, a factorial split-plot experiment was conducted based on randomized complete block design with three replications at Yazd and Mashhad, Iran, during 2012-2013 growing season. Four urea levels and four Azocompost levels (to provide 0, 40, 80 and 120 kg N.ha-1 each) for Yazd location )0, 43.5, ...

The objectives of this study were to assess the biological water of the Iranian Tajan River using different metrics, i.e., a Multimetric Macroinvertebrate Index (MMI) and a traits-based method. Twenty-eight physico-chemical parameters, 10 habitat factors, and abundance of macroinvertebrates were obtained for 17 sites. The Shahid-Rajaie dam divides the Tajan River into an up- and downstream part...

Genetic variation for fitness-relevant traits may be maintained in natural populations by fitness differences that depend on environmental conditions. For herbivores, plant quality and variation in chemical plant defences can maintain genetic variation in performance. Apart from plant secondary compounds, symbiosis between plants and endosymbiotic fungi (endophytes) can produce herbivore-toxic ...

Selection can facilitate diversification by inducing character displacement in mate choice traits that reduce the probability of maladaptive mating between lineages. Although reproductive character displacement (RCD) has been demonstrated in two-taxa case studies, the frequency of this process in nature is still debated. Moreover, studies have focused primarily on visual and acoustic traits, de...

Chemical diversity was estimated by fetching predicted physicochemical properties from the ChemSpider database (http://www.chemspider.com) for the detected metabolites and the metabolites mentioned in the RiceCyc database. Vapor pressure was log transformed and all traits were scaled to unit variance to give them equal importance. Chemical coverage was defined as the percentage of variance amon...