Asian corn borer, Ostrinia furnacalis (Guenée), is the most destructive pest of corn in China. It causes 6 to 9 million ton yield loss in an average year. Biological control using releases of Trichogramma has increased greatly since T. dendrolimi Matsumura can be successfully mass reared on eggs of the Chinese oak silkworm, Antheraea pernyi Guérin-Méneville. The process and technique for mass p...

Hym-301 is a peptide that was discovered as part of a project aimed at isolating novel peptides from hydra. We have isolated and characterized the gene Hym-301, which encodes this peptide. In an adult, the gene is expressed in the ectoderm of the tentacle zone and hypostome, but not in the tentacles. It is also expressed in the developing head during bud formation and head regeneration. Treatme...

This study uses molecular and cytogenetic methods to determine the origin of a B chromosome in some males of the wasp Trichogramma kaykai. This so-called paternal sex ratio (PSR) chromosome transmits only through sperm and shortly after fertilization triggers degeneration of the paternal genome, while keeping itself intact. The resulting embryos develop into haploid B-chromosome-carrying males....

Chromosomes of three chalcid wasp species from Brazil, Palmistichus elaeisis Delvare et LaSalle, 1993, Trichospilus diatraeae Cherian et Margabandhu, 1942 (both belonging to the family Eulophidae) and Trichogramma pretiosum Riley, 1879 (Trichogrammatidae), were studied using chromosome morphometrics and base-specific fluorochrome staining. The present study confirmed that these species respecti...

Corn (Zea mays L.) is cultivated in large areas and considered one of the world’s major cereal crops. There are several arthropod pests that can reduce its production such as the fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda (J.E. Smith) (Lep.: Noctuidae), which is considered to be the main pest for corn. Fall armyworm is primarily controlled by insecticides. The use of biological control agents to mana...

A new species of the genus Laelaspis Berlese, Laelaspis elongatus sp. n. is described based on adult female and male specimens collected in association with Pheidole pallidula (Nylander) (Hym., Formicidae) in Ahwaz, Khuzestan Province, southwestern Iran, and also Acinopus (Acinopus) picipes (Olivier) (Col., Carabidae) in Bam, Kerman Province, southeastern Iran.

Effects of microhabitat complexity on host foraging by three species of Trichogramma (T. deion, T. ostriniae, and T. pretiosum) were evaluated under simulated stored product conditions. All three species have been considered as potential biological control agents for the Indianmeal moth, Plodia interpunctella, in retail stores and warehouses. Trials were conducted with single naı̈ve female paras...

Egg parasitoids face unique developmental constraints. First, they have exceptionally limited resources to support themselves and their siblings through three life stages. Second, they develop within the physiological system of another species, which they modify to their own ends. We examined how these constraints affect the metabolic physiology of egg parasitism, and whether parasitoids retool...

We consider the Hermitian-Yang-Mills (HYM) equations for gauge potentials on a complex vector bundle E over an almost complex manifold X which is the twistor space of an oriented Riemannian manifold M. Each solution of the HYM equations on such X defines a pseudoholomorphic structure on the bundle E . It is shown that the pull-back to X of any anti-selfdual gauge field on M is a solution of the...