Instinctive defensive behaviors are essential for animal survival. Across the animal kingdom, there are sensory stimuli that innately represent threat and trigger stereotyped behaviors such as escape or freezing [1-4]. While innate behaviors are considered to be hard-wired stimulus-responses [5], they act within dynamic environments, and factors such as the properties of the threat [6-9] and it...

This is a description of Carnegie Mellon University's entry in the Sony legged league of RoboCup 2000. See our web page for more details [4]. The main components of our system are: vision, localization, behaviors(including a basic world model), and motions. The main changes for this year are: basic world model, new behaviors/behavior architecture, walking and kicking motions. We placed third in...

Signaling networks among multiple phytohormones fine-tune plant defense responses to insect herbivore attack. Previously, it was reported that the synergistic combination of ethylene (ET) and jasmonic acid (JA) was required for accumulation of the maize insect resistance1 (mir1) gene product, a cysteine (Cys) proteinase that is a key defensive protein against chewing insect pests in maize (Zea ...

Long-standing theory has predicted that plant defensive and nutritional traits contribute to the population dynamics of insect herbivores. To examine the role of plant variation in density dependence, I took a comparative approach by conducting density manipulation experiments with the specialist aphid, Aphis nerii, on 18 species of milkweed (Asclepias spp.). The strength of density dependence ...

A defensive alliance in a graph is a set $S$ of vertices with the property that every vertex in $S$ has at most one moreneighbor outside of $S$ than it has inside of $S$. A defensive alliance $S$ is called global if it forms a dominating set. The global defensive alliance number of a graph $G$ is the minimum cardinality of a global defensive alliance in $G$. In this article we study the global ...

UNLABELLED Defense is a basic survival mechanism when animals face danger. Previous studies have suggested that the midbrain periaqueductal gray (PAG) is essential for the generation of defensive reactions. Here we showed that optogenetic activation of neurons in the PAG in mice was sufficient to induce a series of defensive responses (including running, freezing, and avoidance). However, the e...

The rapid adoption of genetically engineered (GE) plants that express insecticidal Cry proteins derived from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) has raised concerns about their potential impact on non-target organisms. This includes the possibility that non-target herbivores develop into pests. Although studies have now reported increased populations of non-target herbivores in Bt cotton, the underlyin...

Amino acid level is well known indicator of plant resistance to aphids. Our earlier studies showed that grain aphid (Sitobion avenae F.) infestation caused changes in the activity of the enzymes connected with amino acid biosynthesis and the transformation to defensive secondary metabolites within triticale tissues. However, there are not data on the significance of aminotransferases in these p...

Aphids harbour both an obligate bacterial symbiont, Buchnera aphidicola, and a wide range of facultative ones. Facultative symbionts can modify morphological, developmental and physiological host traits that favour their spread within aphid populations. We experimentally investigated the idea that symbionts may also modify aphid behavioural traits to enhance their transmission. Aphids exhibit m...

The evolution of visual warning signals is well known in animals but has received scant attention in plants. The coevolutionary hypothesis is the most influential hypothesis on warning signals in plants proposing that red and yellow leaf colours in autumn signal defensive strength to herbivores. So far, evidence in support of the hypothesis, which assumes a coevolutionary origin of autumnal lea...