The hemlock woolly adelgid, Adelges tsugae Annand, is a major threat to hemlocks in the eastern United States. As part of efforts to control this pest, Scymnus (Neopullus) sinuanodulus Yu et Yao, a potential predator, was collected from hemlocks in Yunnan, China. Three shipments were imported during 1996 and 1997 to a quarantine laboratory to study the beetleÕs biology. Beetles began ovipositio...

Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica Newman) is an emerging silk-feeding insect found in fields in the lower Corn Belt and Midsouthern United States. Studies were conducted in 2010 and 2011 to evaluate how silk clipping in corn affects pollination and yield parameters. Manually clipping silks once daily had modest effects on yield parameters. Sustained clipping by either manually clipping silks t...

During the day, a non-uniform distribution of long and short wavelength light generates a colour gradient across the sky. This gradient could be used as a compass cue, particularly by animals such as dung beetles that rely primarily on celestial cues for orientation. Here, we tested if dung beetles can use spectral cues for orientation by presenting them with monochromatic (green and UV) light ...

Western corn rootworm (WCR), Diabrotica virgifera virgifera LeConte (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae), is the most destructive insect pest of corn (Zea mays L.) in the United States. The adult WCR beetles derive their nourishment from multiple sources including corn pollen and silks as well as the pollen of alternate hosts. Conversely, the corn foliage is largely neglected as a food source by WCR bee...

Vertebrate dung and carrion are rich and strongly attractive resources for numerous beetles that are often closely linked to them. The presence and abundance of beetles exploiting such resources are influenced by various ecological factors including climate and forest cover vegetation. We studied selected assemblages of coprophilous and necrophagous beetles in Quebec along a 115-km north-south...

Feedback from community interactions involving mutualisms are a rarely explored mechanism for generating complex population dynamics. We examined the effects of two linked mutualisms on the population dynamics of a beetle that exhibits outbreak dynamics. One mutualism involves an obligate association between the bark beetle, Dendroctonus frontalis and two mycangial fungi. The second mutualism i...

To date, the vast majority of studies in urban areas have been carried out on birds, yet it is not known whether the responses of birds to urbanization are congruent with those of other taxa. In this paper, we compared the responses of breeding birds and carabid beetles to urbanization, specifically asking whether the emerging generalizations of the effects of extreme levels of urbanization on ...

The effects of non-lethal parasites may be felt most strongly when hosts engage in intense, energy-demanding behaviors. One such behavior is fighting with conspecifics, which is common among territorial animals, including many beetle species. We examined the effects of parasites on the fighting ability of a saproxylic beetle, the horned passalus (Odontotaenius disjunctus, Family: Passalidae), w...

Aggregation behavior of adult western spotted cucumber beetles (Diabrotica undecimpunctata undecimpunctata Mannerheim) (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae) was examined in six snap bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) fields adjacent to corn fields in western Oregon in 2004-2006. In the 2004 and 2005 studies, sweep net sampling was used to estimate beetle numbers along transect lines running perpendicular to the e...

Pyrophilous jewel beetles of the genus Melanophila approach forest fires and there is considerable evidence that these beetles can detect fires from great distances of more than 60 km. Because Melanophila beetles are equipped with infrared receptors and are also attracted by hot surfaces it can be concluded that these infrared receptors are used for fire detection.The sensitivity of the IR rece...