Climate change can alter the phenology of organisms. It may thus lead seasonal organisms to face different day lengths than in the past, and the fitness consequences of these changes are as yet unclear. To study such effects, we used the pea aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum as a model organism, as it has obligately asexual clones which can be used to study day length effects without eliciting a season...

Background. Many aphid species, including the pea aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum, exhibit a behaviour where they drop or fall from their host plant, a commonly used strategy to avoid predation, parasitism or physical disturbance. We hypothesised that there was a physiological non-consumptive cost due to such dropping behaviour because aphids would expend energy re-establishing themselves on a host p...

Four species of entomophthoroid fungi, Pandora neoaphidis (Entomophthorales: Entomophthoraceae), Zoophthora radicans (Entomophthorales: Entomophthoraceae), Entomophthora planchoniana (Entomophthorales: Entomophthoraceae) and Neozygites fresenii (Neozygitales: Neozygitaceae) were found to infect Aphis craccivora, Therioaphis trifolii, and Acyrthosiphon pisum and unidentified species of Acyrthosi...

1. Pea aphids (Acyrthosiphon pisum Harris; Hemiptera: Aphididae) exhibit transgenerational wing polyphenism, in which unwinged females produce genetically identical winged offspring in response to environmental cues such as overcrowding and predation risk that indicate poor habitat quality. 2. Laboratory experiments were carried out to explore the intensity of the wing polyphenic response of pe...

Ecologically important traits of insects are often affected by facultative bacterial endosymbionts. This is best studied in the pea aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum, which is frequently infected by one or more of eight facultative symbiont species. Many of these symbiont species have been shown to provide one ecological benefit, but we have little understanding of the range of effects that a single st...

Inteins are "protein introns" that remove themselves from their host proteins through an autocatalytic protein-splicing. After their discovery, inteins have been quickly identified in organisms from all three kingdoms of life - eucarya, bacteria and archaea, but their distribution is sporadic. Here we report the identification and bioinformatics characterization of intein in DNA polymerase A ge...

in the current study some information is presented about the distribution and associations between alfalfa aphids and their parasitoids in different regions in 11 provinces of iran, as well as an identification key to the parasitoids. the main aphids were therioaphis trifolii maculata (buckton) and acyrthosiphon pisum (harris) followed by aphis craccivora koch and acyrthosiphon kondoi shinji. t...

The evolution of reproductive isolation without geographic isolation (sympatric speciation) has recently gained strong theoretical and empirical supports. It is now widely admitted that many host-specific phytophagous insect species have arisen through shifting and adapting to new plants. The pea aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum has received considerable attention in this context and is now considered...