Olfaction is in many species the most important sense, essential for food search, mate finding, and predator avoidance. Butterflies have been considered a microsmatic group of insects that mainly rely on vision due to their diurnal lifestyle. However, an emerging number of studies indicate that butterflies indeed use the sense of smell for locating food and oviposition sites. To unravel the neu...

A total of 34 floral visitors of Lavandula latifolia (Labiatae) at a southern Spanish locality were examined from the perspective of their "quality" as pollinators. I considered frequency of pollen transfer, number of pollen grains deposited on the stigma, selection of floral sexual stage (flowers are markedly protandrous), and patterns of flight distance between flowers. Hymenoptera deposited ...

We determined the food habit of the Asian parti-coloured bat Vespertilio sinensis from May to August by analysing their faecal samples. Eight orders of insects were identified in the faeces. Lepidoptera, Diptera and Coleoptera had high frequencies of occurrence, but the proportion of each order varied with the sampling period. A comparison between diet composition and relative insect abundance ...

Protease inhibitors, which can inhibit insect digestive enzymes, and carbohydrate binding lectins are potential control mechanisms against herbivorous insects. Larval midgut extracts fi-om Eldana saccharina Walker (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae) were assayed for protease activity in the presence of protease inhibitors in order to determine the dominant protease types (serine, aspartic, metalloor cyste...

Abstact.In this study, we first reported the defense gene (ApDef) in lepidoptera insect, the Chinese oak silkworm Antheraea pernyi (Lepidoptera: Saturniidae). It consists of 677 bp with a putative open reading frame (ORF) of 492 bp encoding 163 amino acids residues. A signal peptide with 18 amino acids and a typical reeler domain was found in ApDef protein. Phylogenetic analysis indicated that ...

The oriental fruit moth, Grapholita molesta (Busck) (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae), is an important pest of most stone and pome fruits and causes serious damage to the fruit industry worldwide. This insect pest has been primarily controlled through the application of insecticides; as a result, G. molesta has developed resistance to many different types of insecticides. To identify detoxification ge...

Background The use of Bt crystal protein as a natural insecticide, applied directly to crops has been true for many years. Cry genes codifing these proteins are already are being used in transformation plants that become resistant to certain insects. The aim of this study was to compare the amino acid sequences that encode the Cry protein to insects of the orders Lepidoptera, Diptera and Lepido...

Elasmus steffani (Viggiani) (Hymenoptera: Elasmidae) is a gregarious idiobiont ectoparasitoid of Prays oleae (Bernard) (Lepidoptera: Plutellidae), an olive crop pest. In the substitute host Ephestia kuehniella (Zeller) (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae), the duration of the developmental stages was approximately 11-15 days. The preoviposition was 8.9 ± 5.0 days, and oviposition lasted 30.4 ± 10.5 days, w...

-The optimization of assay conditions for glutathione S-transferase and epoxide hydrolase activities in the cabbage looper (Trichoplusia ni [Hiibner], Lepidoptera; Noctuidae) using trans and cis-stilbene oxides as substrates are reported. Glutathione S-transferase activity was predominantly cytosolic, and it was much greater in the fat body than the midgut. Differences in pH optima and rates of...