Host plants affect development, survival, and reproduction of phytophagous insects. In the case of holometabolous species, whose larvae have little mobility to find a host plant, the ability of females to discriminate hosts on the basis of their nutritional quality may be an important factor determining insect performance. The preference‒performance correlation hypothesis states that females wi...

Destructive host-feeding is common in hymenopteran parasitoids. Such feeding may be restricted to host stages not preferred for oviposition. However, whether this is a fixed strategy or can vary according to resource levels or parasitoid needs is less clear. We tested the trade-off between host feeding and oviposition on two whitefly parasitoids under varying host densities. Females of two aphe...

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpara.2015.03.012 0020-7519/ 2015 Australian Society for Parasitology Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author at: Redpath Museum, Department of Biology, McGill University, 859 Rue Sherbrook Ouest, Montreal, Quebec H3A 0C4, Canada. E-mail address: [email protected] (V.M. Frankel). Victor M. Frankel a,b,⇑, Andrew P. Hend...

Scelionid egg parasitoids can obtain reliable information on the presence of host eggs by discriminating host gender on the basis of chemical footprints of their co-evolved hosts, with a strong preference for the footprint left by host females. Based on the concept of dietary specialization and infochemical use in natural enemies, it could be predicted that host gender discrimination in special...

Using path anaysis and the 5 per cent PUMS data of the 1990 and 2000 [US] censuses, this study examines: (1) the correlation between Chinese-American sex preference for children and their fertility behavior; and (2) the interaction between the sex preference and its socioeconomic determinants. Of the normative and non-normative factors investigated in this study, offspring sex preference is the...

We present an ontological framework, based on preference rankings, that allows users to express their preferences between the knowledge explicitly available in the ontology. Using this formalism, the answers for a given query to an ontology can be ranked by preference, allowing users to retrieve the most preferred answers only. We provide a host of complexity results for the main computational ...

The Rhagoletis pomonella species complex is one of the foremost examples supporting the occurrence of sympatric speciation. A recent study found that reciprocal F(1) hybrid offspring from different host plant-infesting populations in the complex displayed significantly reduced olfactory host preference in flight-tunnel assays. Behavioral and electrophysiological studies indicate that olfactory ...

in this research, the host preference and life cycle of the colorado potato beetle, leptinotarsa decemlineata (say), was studied on 33 potato cultivars. significant difference was observed for all studied traits (p>0.05 & p>0.01). the lowest number of adults was attracted to cultivars raja, carlita and bridget with mean values of 0.33±0.17, 0.50±0.29 and 0.50±0.29 adults, respectively. the lowe...

The evolution of host specificity and the potential trade-off between being a generalist and a specialist are central issues in the evolutionary ecology of parasites. Different species of parasites or even different populations of the same species often show different degrees of host specificity. However, less is known about intraspecific variation in host specificity within a population. We in...

Laboratory experiments were conducted to examine selection by Cotesia plutellae between host larvae feeding on two plant species: Chinese cabbage, Brassica campestris ssp. pekinensis and common cabbage, Brassica oleracea var. capitata. When C. plutellae wasps were provided with equal numbers of Plutella xylostella larvae on both species of plants in one arena, the parasitoid parasitised 4-15 fo...