The chemical composition of the watery saliva of hemipteran (both homopteran and heteropteran) insects is crucial for effective feeding, because these insects rely heavily on saliva for extra-oral digestion (Cohen, 1995, 1996, 1998) or detoxification of defensive chemicals (Miles & Oertli, 1993). For phytophagous hemipterans, saliva can also be involved in plant injury. Yet, salivary compositio...

Sympatric speciation is the splitting of one evolutionary lineage into two without the occurrence of geographic isolation. The concept has been intimately tied to entomology since the 1860s, when Benjamin Walsh proposed that many host-specific phytophagous insects originate by shifting and adapting to new host plant species. If true, sympatric speciation would have tremendous implications for o...

The radiation of flowering plants in the mid-Cretaceous transformed landscapes and is widely believed to have fuelled the radiations of major groups of phytophagous insects. An excellent group to test this assertion is the scale insects (Coccomorpha: Hemiptera), with some 8,000 described Recent species and probably the most diverse fossil record of any phytophagous insect group preserved in amb...

A three-year survey of kudzu foliage, seed, stems, and roots for associated phytophagous insects was conducted to establish basic information about the insect communities that kudzu harbors in China and to assess the abundance, diversity and damage caused by these insects. Diseases of kudzu were also surveyed in southern China. A total of 116 phytophagous insect species in 31 families and 5 ord...