To return to their feet, inverted click-beetles (Elateridae) jump without using their legs. When a beetle is resting on its dorsal side, a hinge mechanism is locked to store elastic energy in the body and releases it abruptly to launch the beetle into the air. While the functional morphology of the jumping mechanism is well known, the level of control that the beetle has over this jumping techn...

Exotic tree pathogens can cause devastating ecological effects on forests that can be exacerbated when infections increase the likelihood of attack by insects. Current high rates of mortality of whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis Engelm.) are due to white pine blister rust caused by the exotic fungus, Cronartium ribicola J.C. Fisch, and the native mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hop...

Background Few studies of edge effects on wildlife objectively identify habitat edges or explore non-linear responses. In this paper, we build on ground beetle (Coleoptera: Carabidae) research that has begun to address these domains by using triangulation wombling to identify boundaries in beetle community structure and composition at the edges of forest patches with residential developments. W...

Communities and ecosystems in the Alaskan boreal forest are undergoing substantial change. People contribute to this change. They are also impacted by the consequences. For example, wildfire and spruce bark beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis) outbreaks have increased in frequency and severity due to warming trends, affecting the ecosystem and services important to people. I conducted a study to ex...

Edamame soybeans are a speciality food item for fresh and processed markets and they are harvested at a physiologically immature (R6) stage. Bean leaf beetle, Cerotoma trifurcata, is a sporadic pest of soybean in Nebraska, however, its pest status and abundance has increased in the recent years due to an increase in soybean acreage. This was a field experiment aimed at determining the populatio...

Mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins, is the most significant mortality agent in pine forests of western North America. Silvicultural treatments that reduce the number of susceptible host trees, alter age and size class distributions, and diversify species composition are considered viable, long-term options for reducing stand susceptibility to mountain pine beetle-caused tree ...

Efforts to describe the complex relationships between bark beetles and the ophiostomatoid (stain) fungi they transport have largely resulted in a dichotomous classiÞcation. These symbioses have been viewed as either mutualistic (i.e., fungi help bark beetles colonize living trees by overcoming tree defenses or by providing nutrients after colonization in return for transport to a host) or antag...

To determine whether plant genotype can affect long-term herbivore population dynamics, we used a density manipulation experiment to compare the dynamics of Mexican bean beetle populations living on four genotypes of soybeans. Five densities of beetle populations were created on each plant genotype. Each combination of density and genotype was replicated four times, yielding 80 experimental bee...