Soon after his return from the Malay Archipelago, Alfred Russel Wallace published one of his most significant papers. The paper used butterflies of the family Papilionidae as a model system for testing evolutionary hypotheses, and included a revision of the Papilionidae of the region, as well as the description of some 20 new species. Wallace argued that the Papilionidae were the most advanced ...

This paper describes the primary structures of two opsins of short-wavelength-absorbing visual pigments deduced from the mRNA sequences in the retina of the Japanese yellow swallowtail butterfly Papilio xuthus. A phylogenetic analysis of the amino acid sequences indicates that one of these visual pigments is of the ultraviolet-absorbing type and that the other is of the blue-absorbing type. We ...

The first detections of Asian citrus psyllid, Diaphorina citri Kuwayama, in North America occurred almost simultaneously in Florida and in the Caribbean (Guadeloupe). Damaging populations on citrus have been reported in Florida but not in Puerto Rico where the psyllid was first detected in 2001, having probably arrived with its parasitoid, Tamarixia radiata Waterston. In an effort to identify a...

Dispersal and colonization of new areas by armored scale insects (Hemiptera: Diaspididae) is achieved by mobile first-instar nymphs, called crawlers. Few studies have considered the actual mechanisms by which crawlers disperse, and although crawlers are capable of actively wandering over short distances (generally < 1 m), their dispersal over longer distances has been thought to be wind-mediate...