Arthropods are very diverse, come in many different forms with diverse adaptations, and through such diversity have populated all environmental niches on the planet. Almost 80% of the animals on planet Earth belong to this phylum. Despite their very diverse phenotypes they share fundamental similarities which were previously used to generate a phylogenetic tree. All arthropods have segmented bo...

Insectivorous birds and ants co-occur in most terrestrial communities, and theory predicts that emergent properties (i.e., nonadditive effects) can determine their combined influence on arthropods and plants. In a three-year factorial experiment, I investigated whether the effects of birds on pine and its arthropods differed based on the presence of ants that were predators of most arthropods, ...

Full-Malaria/Parasites is a database for transcriptome studies of apicomplexa and other parasites, which is based on our original full-length cDNA sequences and physical cDNA clone resources. In this update, the database has been expanded to contain the shogun sequencing for the entire sequences of 14,818 non-redundant full-length cDNA clones from six apicomplexa parasites and 6.8 million of tr...

Because all spiders are predators and most subdue their prey with poison, it has been suggested that fear of spiders is an evolutionary adaptation. However, it has not been sufficiently examined whether other arthropods similarly elicit fear or disgust. Our aim was to examine if all arthropods are rated similarly, if only potentially dangerous arthropods (spiders, bees/wasps) elicit comparable ...

Wolbachia is a genus of obligate intracellular bacteria in the Anaplasmataceae family of the -Proteobacteria that are transmitted through the egg cytoplasm and manipulate reproduction in their hosts in various ways (Werren, 1997). Wolbachia are associated with cytoplasmic incompatibility, parthenogenesis, feminization and male killing in arthropods and these aspects have been adequately reviewe...