Development and reproductive potential of the Coccinella septempunctata L. (CSL) was conducted under laboratory conditions to determine its fecundity and longevity on natural and artificial diets. Tests were made on laboratory rearing materials and all development stages were carefully recorded. Success ratios in these experiments were a matter of logistic and synchronization of these life cycl...

The sand fly Lutzomyia longipalpis is the most important vector of American Visceral Leishmaniasis. Adults are phytophagous (males and females) or blood feeders (females only), and larvae feed on solid detritus. Digestion in sand fly larvae has scarcely been studied, but some glycosidase activities putatively involved in microorganism digestion were already described. Nevertheless, the molecula...

Ann. Entomol. Soc. Am. 81(6): 950-953 (1988) ABSTRACT A simple root-warming device maintains the plants' roots at a higher temperature than that at which the rest of the plant is held. This permits the host plant to retain turgor, not wilt, and therefore remain suitable for and attractive to phytophagous insects. The technique was demonstrated in a development and fecundity test using the cotto...

Despite sequestration of toxins being a common coevolutionary response to plant defence in phytophagous insects, the macroevolution of the traits involved is largely unaddressed. Using a phylogenetic approach comprising species from four continents, we analysed the ability to sequester toxic cardenolides in the hemipteran subfamily Lygaeinae, which is widely associated with cardenolide-producin...

Plant phenolics are secondary metabolites that encompass several classes structurally diverse of natural products biogenetically arising from the shikimate-phenylpropanoids-flavonoids pathways. Plants need phenolic compounds for pigmentation, growth, reproduction, resistance to pathogens and for many other functions. Therefore, they represent adaptive characters that have been subjected to natu...

11-19 ABSTRACT Several different species of annual medics have been tested for the occurrence and concentration of trypsin inhibitors in the seed. Trypsin Inhibitory Activity (TIA) has been in fact related to the level of resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses. Wide variation was found for TIA among species, with the highest values shown by the snail medic (Medicago scutellata). After a simp...

Roots play a critical, but largely unappreciated, role in aboveground anti-herbivore plant defense (e.g. resistance and tolerance) and root-leaf connections may therefore result in unexpected coupling between above- and belowground consumers. Using the tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) system we highlight two examples of this phenomenon. First, the secondary metabolite nicotine is produced in roots, ...

The properties and actions of the bridged diphenyl acaricides are discussed. These pesticides, which are more or less structurally related to DDT, were the first of the specific acaricides to be developed. They exhibit remarkable properties of specificity, being primarily toxic to phytophagous mites but of very low toxicity to most nontarget species, including insects, fish, birds, and mammals....

The ability of insects to utilize different host plants has been suggested to be a dynamic and transient phase. During or after this phase, species can shift to novel host plants or respecialize on ancestral ones. Expanding the range of host plants might also be a factor leading to higher levels of net speciation rates. In this paper, we have studied the possible importance of host plant range ...

1 International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Patancheru 502324, Telangana, India. 2 Department of Plant Breeding & Genetics, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana-141004, India. 3 Department of Botany and Biotechnology, Degree College Sopore-193201, J&K, India. 4 Department of Entomology, SKUAST-K; Shalimar, Srinagar, J&K, India. *Corresponding author: abdul...