It takes a special kind of insect to pollinate an inside-out flower, which is exactly what the wasps that pollinate figs do. Crawling inside the firm swelling lined with microscopic flowers that will eventually ripen into a fleshy fig, tiny fig wasps pollinate the flowers within while laying their own eggs. However, the fig wasps’ robust nursery is not entirely secure. Renee Borges from the Ind...

BACKGROUND Avian brood parasites and their hosts are involved in complex offence-defense coevolutionary arms races. The most common pair of reciprocal adaptations in these systems is egg discrimination by hosts and egg mimicry by parasites. As mimicry improves, more advanced host adaptations evolve such as decreased intra- and increased interclutch variation in egg appearance to facilitate dete...

Intraspecific nest parasitism is a phenomenon that attracts the attention of biologists since it helps in saving endangered species such as Slender Billed Gull. The problem comes from fact parasite female lays its eggs another (host) same which causes abandon by host. This behavior significant reduction future birds number and leads to expansion this specie. Thus, there has been an urgent neces...

The sphingid moth larvae are voracious defoliators of several crops. present study was conducted to investigate damage Acherontia styx on Jasmine, their seasonal incidence, and bioecology. Larval instars fed jasmine leaves flowers, with the highest defoliation being 35% flower 47% during September. lifecycle consisted egg, five larval instars, pupal, adult stages. eggs were pearly white in colo...

Although parasites and their hosts often coexist in a set of environmentally differentiated populations connected by gene flow, few empirical studies have considered a role of environmental variation in shaping correlations between traits of hosts and parasites. Here, we studied for the first time the association between the frequency of adaptive parasitic common cuckoo Cuculus canorus phenotyp...

1. The dynamics of parasitic organisms depend critically upon the frequency distribution of parasite individuals per host. However, the processes giving rise to this frequency distribution have rarely been modelled and tested for organisms with complex host selection behaviour. 2. In this study Microrhopala vittata, a chrysomelid beetle, was used to investigate how oviposition behaviour, moveme...

Plants can recruit parasitic wasps in response to egg deposition by herbivorous insects-a sophisticated indirect plant defense mechanism. Oviposition by the Large Cabbage White butterfly Pieris brassicae on Brussels sprout plants induces phytochemical changes that arrest the egg parasitoid Trichogramma brassicae. Here, we report the identification of an elicitor of such an oviposition-induced p...

David Giron* and Jérôme Casas Institut de Recherche sur la Biologie de l’Insecte (Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, Unité Mixte de Recherche 6035), Faculté des Sciences, Université de Tours, 37200 Tours, France *Correspondence: E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Precise and comprehensive data on resource allocation into individual eggs are rare and this empirical void in the lite...

The objective of this study was to evaluate the risk of soil transmitted zoonotic helminth infections for families with young children, inhabitants of villages in the Mazowieckie Province of Central Poland. Epidemiological survey was conducted at 33 randomly selected households with 2-3 children present. Examination of soil samples from yards surrounding the houses for the presence of geohelmin...