background: laboratory bred sand flies are essential for the study of different biological phenomena including the transmis­sion dynamics of leishmania . the aim of the study was to determine the suitable situation for colonization and main­tenance of iranian strain of phlebotomus papatasi at laboratory conditions from an endemic focus of cutaneous leishmani­asis due to leishmania major . metho...

wolbachia is an obligatory, intracellular α-proteobacterium which infect the reproductive and somatic tissues of some arthropod and nematode populations. because there are not any available data on the presence of this bacterium in iran, the present study was done to determine the presence of this bacterium among 30 species of arthropods and nematodes. after dna extraction from samples, we scre...

Genotypic diversity within host-plant populations has been linked to the diversity of associated arthropod communities, but the temporal dynamics of this relationship, along with the underlying mechanisms, are not well understood. In this study, we employed a common garden experiment that manipulated the number of genotypes within patches of Solidago altissima, tall goldenrod, to contain 1, 3, ...

W hat can we learn from the brain of a single member of a species? If the brain is that of a remipede, the focus of a report by Fanenbruck et al. (1) in this issue of PNAS, the answer is something new about arthropod phylogeny. The Remipedia, discovered in 1979, are crustaceans found deep in the waters of coastal caves (2, 3). To date, twelve species of remipedes are known: one from a single ca...

Arthropod transmission of tularemia occurs throughout the northern hemisphere. Few pathogens show the adaptability of Francisella tularensis to such a wide array of arthropod vectors. Nonetheless, arthropod transmission of F. tularensis was last actively investigated in the first half of the 20th century. This review will focus on arthropod transmission to humans with respect to vector species,...

Cattle grazing and invasion by non-native plant species are globally-ubiquitous changes occurring to plant communities that are likely to reverberate through whole food webs. We used a manipulative field experiment to quantify how arthropod community structure differed in native and non-native California grassland communities in the presence and absence of grazing. The arthropod community was s...

We used Malaise traps to examine the aerial arthropod community in riparian habitats dominated by native willow, exotic saltcedar, or a mixture of these two tree species in central Arizona, USA. Over the course of three sampling periods per year in 2003 and 2004, native habitats had significantly greater diversity (Shannon–Wiener) and supported different arthropod communities compared to exotic...