Dasineura oleae was considered a minor pest in olive orchards. However, the last decade, outbreaks have been reported all over its distribution area. Little is known about D. biological control strategies; therefore, investigations into biology and ecology of parasitoids are urgently needed. In this scenario, present field study flight period parasitoids, evaluating their relative abundance oth...

The statistical properties of the standardized variance of gene frequency changes (a quantity equivalent to Wright's inbreeding coefficient) in a random mating population are studied, and new formulae for estimating the effective population size are developed. The accuracy of the formulae depends on the ratio of sample size to effective size, the number of generations involved (t), and the numb...

Mutualism between individuals of two species is increasingly recognized as a common and important ecological interaction. Interactions between ants and honeydew-producing hemipteran insects are abundant and widespread in arthropod food webs, though their ecological consequences are not well understood. Ant-hemipteran interactions have potentially broad ecological effects, because the presence o...

Elasmus steffani (Viggiani) (Hymenoptera: Elasmidae) is a gregarious idiobiont ectoparasitoid of Prays oleae (Bernard) (Lepidoptera: Plutellidae), an olive crop pest. In the substitute host Ephestia kuehniella (Zeller) (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae), the duration of the developmental stages was approximately 11-15 days. The preoviposition was 8.9 ± 5.0 days, and oviposition lasted 30.4 ± 10.5 days, w...