Different biological parameters of the stink bugs, Nezara viridula L. and Piezodorus guildinii Westwood (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae), are affected by the developmental stage of the soybean (Glycine max Merrill) pods they feed on. These effects of the soybean on the stink bugs could represent a selection pressure leading to the ability of these species to discriminate the phenological stage of soyb...

A two-year study was conducted in South Carolina wheat (Triticum aestivum L. (Poales: Poaceae)) fields to describe spatial and temporal dynamics of stink bugs (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae), which were sampled weekly with sweep nets. In 2010, the main phytophagous stink bugs caught in a grid sampling plan across two fields were the brown stink bug, Euschistus servus (Say), the rice stink bug, Oebalu...

BACKGROUND DNA barcoding, the analysis of sequence variation in the 5' region of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) gene, has been shown to provide an efficient method for the identification of species in a wide range of animal taxa. In order to assess the effectiveness of barcodes in the discrimination of Heteroptera, we examined 344 species belonging to 178 genera, drawn from spec...

There are 63 species of aquatic bugs in Britain, of which 37 are listed as occurring in Scotland (Savage 1989). A preliminary report to Scottish Natural Heritage on the distribution of aquatic bugs in Scotland, supplemented by records for 1997 (Huxley 1997a, 1998), lists 45 (possibly 46) species, albeit a few in this list are very rare or may not still occur. In this article I summarize the fin...

The typical insect mitochondrial (mt) genome organization, which contains a single chromosome with 37 genes, was found in the infraorder Pentatomomorpha (suborder Heteroptera). The arrangement of mt genes in these true bugs is usually the same as the ancestral mt gene arrangement of insects. Rearrangement of transfer RNA (tRNA) genes, however, has been found in two subfamilies of flat bugs (Mez...