Many insects deposit marking pheromones following egg-laying that signal an occupied and thus sub-optimal resource. Herbivorous insects mark host fruit or other vegetative plant parts after depositing eggs, while insect parasitoids deposit such pheromones directly on the cuticle of a particular life stage of their prey. These oviposition marking pheromones (OMPs) are then recognized by conspeci...

While several software programs exist to count bacterial colonies on a Petri plate, no suitable solution is available for quick and reliable enumeration of small, live insects. We have written a program called FlyCounter that can obtain counts from images, even if insects are highly clumped in space. We also describe a simple and inexpensive system for anesthetizing and capturing high-quality i...

An experiment was conducted to manage the eggplant (brinjal) shoot and fruit borer Leucinodes orbonalis Guenée (Lepidoptera: Crambidae), the leafhopper Amrasca biguttula biguttula (Ishida) (Hemiptera: Cicadellidae), and the whitefly Bemisia tabaci (Gennadius) (Hemiptera: Aleyrodidae) during kharif, the southwest monsoon season (Jul-Oct), in 2010 and 2011 at an experimental farm at the Division ...

Powered flight was first mastered by insects, many millions of years ago. Now, studies with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster reveal the critical role of a conserved transcription factor in programming the development of specialized flight muscles.

Lepidopteran types of podborer and homopteran aphid insects are damaging pests of chickpea. CryIAc toxins are established control agents for podborers but do not or only slightly affect homopteran (sucking) insects. However, certain plant lectins are known for their power of killing aphids. Bioassay experiments carried out in our laboratory with lectins isolated from garlic leaves have already ...

Flying insects have evolved sophisticated sensory-motor systems, and here we argue that such systems are used to keep upright against intrinsic flight instabilities. We describe a theory that predicts the instability growth rate in body pitch from flapping-wing aerodynamics and reveals two ways of achieving balanced flight: active control with sufficiently rapid reactions and passive stabilizat...

In a natural environment, insects are constantly being knocked about by wind or visual and mechanical perturbations. And yet they appear to be unperturbed and are able to correct their course with ease. The halteres, mentioned earlier, provide a fast gyroscopic sensor that enables a fruit fly to keep track of its angular rotational rate. Recent work has found that when a fruit fly’s body orient...

Insects of the Diptera order of the Tephritidae family cause costly, annual crop losses worldwide. Monitoring traps are important components of integrated pest management programs used against fruit flies. Here we report the modification of typical, low-cost plastic traps for fruit flies by adding the necessary optoelectronic sensors to monitor the entrance of the trap in order to detect, time-...

BACKGROUND Beyond insecticides, alternative methods to control insect pests for agriculture and vectors of diseases are needed. Management strategies involving the mass-release of living control agents have been developed, including genetic control with sterile insects and biological control with parasitoids, for which aerial release of insects is often required. Aerial release in genetic contr...

BACKGROUND Egg-laying animals, such as insects, ensure the survival of their offspring by depositing their eggs in favorable environments. To identify suitable oviposition sites, insects, such as the vinegar fly Drosophila melanogaster, assess a complex range of features. The fly selectively lays eggs in fermenting fruit. However, the precise cues and conditions that trigger oviposition remain ...