At midday, surface temperatures in the desert often exceed 60°C. To be active at this time, animals need extraordinary behavioural or physiological adaptations. Desert ants, for instance, spend up to 75% of their foraging time cooling down on elevated thermal refuges such as grass stalks. Ball-rolling dung beetles work under similar thermal conditions in South African savannahs. After landing a...

Lepidoptera feed at mud puddles, dung, and carrion in a behavior known as puddling. Sodium and sometimes protein are feeding cues, are actively collected, and play a potentially important role in lepidopteran nutritional and mating ecology. We showed that montane butterßy species have feeding preferences among mud, herbivore dung, and carnivore dung, and that these preferences differed among bu...

In recent decades, pastoral abandonment has produced profound ecological changes in the Alps. In particular, the reduction in grazing has led to extensive shrub encroachment of semi-natural grasslands, which may represent a threat to open habitat biodiversity. To reverse shrub encroachment, we assessed short-term effects of two different pastoral practices on vegetation and dung beetles (Coleop...

Background Ruminant dung is a highly ephemeral, patchily distributed resource, which is utilized by a diverse community of invertebrate species. This ecologically important community may be affected adversely by insecticide and endectocide residues in the faeces of treated cattle. The aim of the present work was to quantify the aggregation of the insects colonising cow-dung in cattle pastures a...

INTRODUCTION Cow dung known since long ago for its germicidal properties, used by Indian villagers to clean the house premises. As cow dung is not available easily, nowadays people have started using synthetic yellow coloured powder (Auramine-o) available easily in grocery shops locally known as "Morechap powder" in districts of Maharashtra. As the poisoning is rare, very few literatures are av...

No field failure of azinphosmethyl had been noticed in controlling codling moth from Oregon until 1989. However, in a study conducted by Moffitt et al. during 1986 to 1987, a codling moth population from Medford has been reported resistant to diflubenzuron. It was suspected that selection by other commonly used compounds was probably responsible for this resistance. We initiated our work in 198...