Comparative studies on antennal sensillar equipment in insects are largely lacking, despite their potential to provide insights into both ecological and phylogenetic relationships. Here we present the first comparative study on antennal morphology and sensillar equipment in female Cynipoidea (Hymenoptera), a large and diverse group of wasps, with special reference to the so-called gall-wasps (C...

Mosquito species of the Aedes (Stegomyia) scutellaris (Walker) group (Diptera: Culicidae) are distributed across many islands of the South Pacific and include major regional vectors of filariasis, such as Aedes polynesiensis (Marks). Analysis of populations of Ae. polynesiensis at the extremes of its range, from Fiji and from Moorea, French Polynesia, using the rDNA ITS2 (internal transcribed s...

Increasing numbers of phylogeographic studies make comparative inferences about the histories of co-distributed species. Although the aims of such studies are best achieved by jointly analysing sequences from multiple loci in a model-based framework, such data currently exist for few nonmodel systems. We used existing genomic data and expressed sequence tags (ESTs) for Hymenoptera and other ins...

Two general hypotheses that describe the relationship between plant quality and host-plant preference of insect herbivores are the plant-stress and plant-vigor hypotheses. We examined the response of a gall-forming guild of insect herbivores associated with prairie rose, Rosa arkansana Porter (Rosaceae), to experimental manipulations of plant stress (addition of NaCl) and vigor (addition of nit...

Galls are highly specialized plant tissues whose development is induced by another organism. The most complex and diverse galls are those induced on oak trees by gallwasps (Hymenoptera: Cynipidae: Cynipini), each species inducing a characteristic gall structure. Debate continues over the possible adaptive signi¢cance of gall structural traits; some protect the gall inducer from attack by natura...