The foundation of many plant-ant mutualisms is ant protection of plants from herbivores in exchange for food and/or shelter. While the role of symbiotic ants in protecting plants from stem- and leaf-feeding herbivores has been intensively studied, the relationship between ant defense and measures of plant fitness has seldom been quantified. We studied ant aggression, damage by herbivores and se...

operophtera brumata (linnaeus, 1758) is a winter moth with wingless females. it is a serious pest in forestry and fruit cultivation in europe. we present the first report of its occurrence in iran. moths of both sexes and their genitalia are illustrated. the species is distinguishable from its sister species o. fagata (scharfenberg, 1805) by a smaller male and the presence of two signa on the c...

Vascular epiphytes are an understudied and particularly important component of tropical forest ecosystems. However, owing to the difficulties of access, little is known about the properties of epiphyte-host tree communities and the factors structuring them, especially in Asia. We investigated factors structuring the vascular epiphyte-host community and its network properties in a tropical monta...

Foliar fungal communities of plants are diverse and ubiquitous. In grasses endophytes may increase host fitness; in trees, their ecological roles are poorly understood. We investigated whether the genotype of the host tree influences community structure of foliar fungi. We sampled leaves from genotyped balsam poplars from across the species' range, and applied 454 amplicon sequencing to charact...

Variations in synchronicity between colonization rate by the pathogen and host phenology may account for unexplained spatial distribution of canker disease. The hypothesis that synchronous pathogenicity and host development are necessary for incidence of sudden oak death disease was tested by correlating seasonal variations in host cambial phenology and response to inoculation with Phytophthora...

A population of herbivorous insects that shifts to a novel host can experience selection pressures that result in adaptation to the new resource. Host race formation, considered an early stage of the speciation process, may result. ! e current study investigates host shifts and variation in traits potentially involved in the evolution of reproductive isolation among populations of the juniper h...

If we took all of the single copy genes in all sequenced genomes, made phylogenetic trees from them individually, and then made the supertree of those trees, what would we get? Recently, David Pisani and colleagues did that experiment and their results are likely to spark much discussion. Their prokaryote tree looks very familiar, but the genome history of eukaryotes appears dominated by genes ...

Oleoresin characteristics of first-generation (F,) progeny of loblolly pines (Pin~rs tuedu L.) that escaped mortality from the southern pine beetle, Z)c~r?n’mc,torzu.s ,fi-ontu1i.v Zimmermann (Coleoptera: Scolytidae), despite heavy mortality of neighbors, were evaluated and compared to trees from a general (i.e., trees produced from bulk seed sources) population over the course of two and a hal...