Nutrition is the important physiological process, which plays a prime role in the growth and in turn it affects the productivity of the silkworm. The supplementation of different materials along with mulberry leaves to silkworm results higher yield because the production of quality silk mainly depends on larval nutrition. The influence of antibiotic on growth and development of silkworm larva a...

The electrophoretic pattern of proteins and the activity of acid phosphatase were described in the midgut extracts during the post-embryonic stages of Apis mellifera L. in order to stablish a correlation with the metamorphosis events. The results show the greatest variation in proteic electrophoretical bands during prepupal stage and the smallest variation during the brown eyed pupae stage. The...

The silkworm Dominant trimolting (Moltinism, M³) mutant undergoes three larval molts and exhibits precocious metamorphosis. In this study, we found that compared with the wild-type (WT) that undergoes four larval molts, both the juvenile hormone (JH) concentration and the expression of the JH-responsive gene Krüppel homolog 1 (Kr-h1) began to be greater in the second instar of the M³ mutant. A ...

Belowground herbivores impact plant performance, thereby inducing changes in plant community composition, which potentially leads to cascading effects onto higher trophic levels and ecosystem processes and productivity. Among soil-living insects, external root-chewing generalist herbivores have the strongest impact on plants. However, the lack of knowledge on their feeding behaviour under field...

Based on captive breeding, reproductive biology including mating, egg deposition and maternal brood care, and postembryonic development were examined and described in detail in the basal dermapteran Diplatys flavicollis (Shiraki, 1907) (Forficulina: Diplatyidae). The eggs possess an adhesive stalk at the posterior pole, by which they attach to the substratum. The mother cares for the eggs and o...

The developmental events occurring during moulting and metamorphosis of insects are controlled by precisely timed changes in levels of ecdysteroids, the moulting hormones. The final four sequential hydroxylations of steroid precursors into the active ecdysteroid of insects, 20E (20-hydroxyecdysone), are mediated by four cytochrome P450 (P450) enzymes, encoded by genes in the Halloween family. O...

Variation in the type of tissue that larvae feed on can produce marked differences in developmental rate and body size, which can compromise predictions of minimum postmortem interval. A series of experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of fat content in the diet on larval growth in Chrysomya megacephala (Fabricius) (Diptera: Calliphoridae), an important forensic blowfly species in...

With the recent commercialization of transgenic rootworm-resistant maize with high levels of antibiosis to larval feeding, the biology of western corn rootworm, Diabrotica virgifera virgiferaLeConte, on hosts beyondmaize,Zea maysL., has become an important topic for which data are limited.Larval survivorship andgrowthparametersweremonitoredon the roots of 29plant species comprised of maize, mai...

Use of Juvenile Hormone Analogues (JHA) in sericulture practices has been shown to boost good cocoon yield; their effect has been determined to be dose-dependent. We studied the impact of low doses of JHA compounds such as methoprene and fenoxycarb on selected key enzymatic activities of the silkworm Bombyx mori. Methoprene and fenoxycarb at doses of 1.0 microg and 3.0 fg/larvae/48 hours showed...

A semi-field bioassay method using commonly available laundry tubs evaluated efficacy and residual activity of 6 granular corncob formulations of Bacillus thuringiensis serovar israelensis against laboratory-reared late 3rd- and early 4th-instar larvae of Aedes taeniorhynchus introduced to the tubs. These formulations produced appreciable larval mortalities (up to 75%) for 9 days posttreatment,...