Rapidly expanding insect populations, deforestation, and global climate change threaten to destabilize key planetary carbon pools, especially the Earth’s forests which link the micro-ecology of insect infestation to climate. To the extent mean temperature increases, insect populations accelerate deforestation. This alters climate via the loss of active carbon sequestration by live trees and inc...

Misof et al. (Reports, 7 November 2014, p. 763) used a genome-scale data set to estimate the relationships among insect orders and the time scale of their evolution. Here, we reanalyze their data and show that their method has led to systematic underestimation of the evolutionary time scale. We find that key insect groups evolved up to 100 million years earlier than inferred in their study.

What is the large-scale spatial representation that insect foragers such as bees and ants form of their wider nest environs? This is the principal question which the following contributions aim to answer.

A partial diallel design was used among 20 maize inbred lines to form 110 F1 hybrids to generate information on the values of these lines for developing insect resistant maize varieties during the short rains season of 2006. The hybrids were evaluated for resistance to the C. partellus and B. fusca, and for agronomic performance over two seasons during long and short rains of 2007 at a mid-alti...

The entomogenous fungus, Lecanicillium lecanii is hyperparasitic on Hemileia vastatrix , the cause of coffee leaf rust in the laboratory, and has frequently been observed attacking it in the field. The existence of a complex ecological web involving the spatially clustered mutualism of an ant ( Azteca instabilis ) with a scale insect ( Coccus viridis ), where the scale insect was infected by L....