Most hovering insects flap their wings in a horizontal plane (body having a large angle from the horizontal), called `normal hovering'. But some of the best hoverers, e.g. true hoverflies, hover with an inclined stroke plane (body being approximately horizontal). In the present paper, wing and body kinematics of four freely hovering true hoverflies were measured using three-dimensional high-spe...

Urbanization gradients influence both landscape and climate provide opportunity for understanding how plants pollinators respond to artificially driven environmental transitions, a relevant aspect the ecosystem service of pollination. Here, we investigated several aspects pollination along an urbanization gradient in climate. We quantified wild hoverfly bee abundances with trapping, standing cr...

Pollinating insects provide economic value by improving crop yield. They are also functionally and culturally important across ecosystems outside of cropland. To understand landscape-level drivers pollinator declines, guide policy intervention to reverse studies must cover (a) multiple insect plant taxa (b) a range agricultural semi-natural land uses. Furthermore, in an era woodland restoration...

I revise the subfamily Diplazontinae to include 99 Western Palaearctic species, review morphological characters useful for species delimitation and identification, and clarify the status of some morphologically similar taxa using molecular approaches. Illustrated, dichotomous keys to the Western Palaearctic genera and species of the subfamily are presented, and the utility of the molecular mark...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently gained growing popularity in wireless communications owing to their many advantages such as swift and cost-effective deployment, line-of-sight (LoS) aerial-to-ground link, and controllable mobility in three-dimensional (3D) space. Although prior works have exploited the UAV’s mobility to enhance the wireless communication performance under different...

During locomotion in a natural environment the visual system of an animal is usually confronted with a large variety of different structures, which cause image motion on the retina. This image motion, called optic flow, is essential for the guidance and calibration of locomotor behavior (Egelhaaf and Kern, 2002; Britten, 2008; Borst et al., 2010). The optic flow produced by distinct, prominent ...

The decline in pollinating insects is well documented globally, leading to potentially severe impacts on floristic biodiversity and human health due the loss of pollination ecosystem services (Klein et al., 2007; Lundgren 2016; Smith 2015). Pollinator declines have occurred a combination habitat loss, climate change, pests diseases use pesticides (Potts 2010). As availability floral resources l...

Animal pollination of crops, especially by insects, is critical for many crops and can be valued at US$195–$387 billion annually (Porto et al., 2020). Preserving or enhancing this service, in the face ongoing climate change, is, therefore, an important consideration farm managers. An first step towards promoting service a crop understanding which are most pollinators that crop. However, while e...

The merit of the SINBAD model is to provide an explicit mechanism showing how the cortex may come to develop detectors responding to correlated properties and therefore corresponding to the sources of these correlations. Here I argue that, contrary to the article, SINBAD neurosemantics does not need to rely on teleofunctions to solve the problem of misrepresentation. A number of difficulties fo...