The use of irradiated hosts in mass rearing tephritid parasitoids represents an important technical advance in fruit fly augmentative biological control. Irradiation assures that fly emergence is avoided in non-parasitized hosts, while at the same time it has no appreciable effect on parasitoid quality, i.e., fecundity, longevity and flight capability. Parasitoids of fruit fly eggs, larvae and ...

Female golden egg bugs show unique flexibility in their oviposition behavior. Females can lay eggs on plants, where they are left unattended, or on the back of conspecifics, where they remain until hatching. In this article we show that eggs have greater survival rates when carried by an adult than when laid on plants. The main causes of egg mortality are predators and a parasitoid wasp. Our re...

In any hosteparasitoid interaction, the detection of the host in its microhabitat is a crucial step in the interaction that has a major influence on the parasitoid’s fitness. We used bioassays to investigate whether the parasitoid Sympiesis sericeicornis (Hymenoptera: Eulophidae) uses the vibrations of its host Phyllonorycter sp. gr. blancardella (Lepidoptera: Gracillariidae) to detect it in th...

Inbreeding and inbreeding depression are processes in small populations of particular interest for a range of human activities such as animal breeding, species conservation, or pest management. In particular, biological control programs should benefit from a thorough understanding of the causes and consequences of inbreeding because natural enemies experience repetitive bottlenecks during impor...

The interactions between Drosophila melanogaster and the parasitoid wasps that infect species provide an important model for understanding host–parasite relationships. Following infection, D. larvae mount a response in which immune cells (hemocytes) form capsule around wasp egg, then melanizes, leading to death of parasitoid. Previous studies have found host hemocyte load; number hemocytes avai...

Much has been written about latitudinal trends in parasitoid diversity and biology, though it is widely recognised that they are a comparatively poorly known group. Here I show that for both braconid and ichneumonid wasps there are highly significant relationships between body size and the mean recorded latitude of species. Numbers of species per genus (surrogates of clades) peaks in the temper...

Choice of livestock bedding has been shown to affect density of filth fly maggots. Here, laboratory experiments indicate that bedding type can also affect natural enemies of the flies, specifically the parasitoid wasps Spalangia endius Walker and Urolepis rufipes (Ashmead) (Hymenoptera: Pteromalidae) parasitizing a natural host, the house fly Musca domestica L. (Diptera: Muscidae). For both par...

Insect outbreaks are expected to increase in frequency and intensity with projected changes in global climate through direct effects of climate change on insect populations and through disruption of community interactions. Although there is much concern about mean changes in global climate, the impact of climatic variability itself on species interactions has been little explored. Here, we comp...

Parasitoid wasps inject their eggs into host along with virulent factors to manipulate hosts physiology and immune system. Heat shock proteins (HSPs) are as molecular chaperones and stress proteins induced by heat, cold, anoxia and parasitism. There was no report about the roles of HSP in insect eggs against egg parasitoids. Here, we studied the expression profiles of several HSPs in silkworm e...

Five species of parasitic wasps associated with hesperiids from peninsular India are documented along with the description of a new species of gregarious endoparasitoid, Dolichogenidea cinnarae sp. nov. (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) parasitic on caterpillar of Borbo cinnara (Wallace) (Lepidoptera: Hesperiidae). Also, the gregarious larval parasitoid, Cotesia erionotae (Wilkinson) (Braconidae) and s...