abstract competition is a phenomenon that influences the size, structure and stability of insect communities, particularly on solitary endoparasitoids species. although, competition normally incurs costs, it might be adaptive for the surviving individual. to determine which factors affect the patch use strategy of foragers under competition, the effect of previous experience with hosts already-...

Parasite species often show differential fitness on different host species. We developed an equation-based model to explore conditions favouring host species exploitation and discrimination. In our model, diploid infective stages randomly encountered hosts of two species; the parasite's relative fitness in exploiting each host species, and its ability to discriminate between them, was determine...

The solitary parasitoid Leptopilina heterotoma is one of the best studied organisms concerning the ecology, behaviour and physiology of host discrimination. Behavioural evidence shows that L. heterotoma uses its ovipositor to discriminate not only between parasitized and unparasitized Drosophila melanogaster larvae, but also to discriminate between hosts with different numbers of parasitoid egg...

The immune response of experimentally infected hamsters and human patients to Mycoplasma pneumoniae was examined by radioimmunoprecipation in conjunction with gel electrophoresis and fluorography. Both intrinsically and extrinsically labeled mycoplasma proteins were coincubated with acute and convalescent sera in a radioimmunoprecipitation assay. Two M. pneumoniae proteins were selectively prec...

Rhagoletis pomonella is a model for incipient sympatric speciation (divergence without geographic isolation) by host-plant shifts. Here, we show that historically derived apple- and ancestral hawthorn-infesting host races of the fly use fruit odor as a key olfactory cue to help distinguish between their respective plants. In flight-tunnel assays and field tests, apple and hawthorn flies prefere...

The enantiomeric recognition of alpha-chiral primary ammonium ions has been studied with benzene-based tripodal tris(oxazoline) receptors. Contrary to the literature and our expectation, a good level of chiral discrimination is observed with one of the tripodal receptors, which provides a C3-symmetric chiral environment on guest binding. The chiral discrimination has been found to be general in...