There is increasing interest in developing urban design principles that incorporate good ecological management. Research on understanding the distribution and role of beneficial pollinating insects, particular, changing our view value cities. With rapid expansion built environment comes a need to understand how insects may be affected extensive areas. We therefore investigated insect pollinator...

Tuta absoluta Meyrick (Lepidoptera: Gelechiidae) is considered one of the main pests threatening tomato production worldwide. In Mediterranean, use predatory mirids widespread, and although several larval parasitoid species have been recorded in area, their contribution to biological control pest often neglected. With general objective improving T. absoluta, our field study aimed determine rela...

This paper reviewed the effects of insect pollination on yield parameters plants from family Brassicaceae presenting different breeding systems. Meta-analysis indicates that in both self-compatible and self-incompatible crop species, meta-analysis seed (Y), silique set (SQS), number siliquae/plant (NSQ), seeds/silique (NSSQ) increase when are insect-pollinated compared to there is no pollinatio...

The longitudinal stabilization control of a hovering model insect was studied using the method of computational fluid dynamics to compute the stability and control derivatives, and the techniques of eigenvalue and eigenvector analysis and modal decomposition, for solving the equations of motion (morphological and certain kinematical data of hoverflies were used for the model insect). The model ...

Measures of biodiversity change such as the Living Planet Index describe proportional change in the abundance of a typical species, which can be thought of as change in the size of a community. Here, I discuss the orthogonal concept of change in relative abundances, which I refer to as shape change. To be logically consistent, a measure of the rate of shape change should be scaling invariant (h...

Bees, hoverflies and butterflies are taxa frequently studied as pollinators in agricultural and conservation contexts. Although there are many records of non-syrphid Diptera visiting flowers, they are generally not regarded as important pollinators. We use data from 30 pollen-transport networks and 71 pollinator-visitation networks to compare the importance of various flower-visiting taxa as po...

Apart from some notable exceptions, mimicry and brightly coloured aposematic patterns have been discussed by biologists mainly from three very different points of view, each making unrealistic assumptions about aspects of the other two (Mallet and Joron, 1999). The most obvious in the voluminous literature (see Komarek, 1998) is the insect natural history approach, used by both naturalists and ...

Here, we present a suite of photogrammetric methods for reconstructing insect wing kinematics, to provide instantaneous topographic maps of the wing surface. We filmed tethered locusts (Schistocerca gregaria) and free-flying hoverflies (Eristalis tenax) using four high-speed digital video cameras. We digitized multiple natural features and marked points on the wings using manual and automated t...