Wasp in Biological News

Fate in fly sensory organ precursor cells could explain human immune disorder

... found that the Arp2/3 complex and its activator wasp (Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome protein) function in ... syndrome have mutations in a gene called WASp. wasp is an activator of the Arp2/3 complex. In our work we found that wasp is also required for the trafficking of Delta to ...

Host shift triggers cascading effect on ecosystem, research finds

... Forbes and his colleagues found that a parasitic wasp ( Diachasma alloeum ) that attacks the apple ... study, Forbes and his co-authors showed that the wasp D. alloeum is undergoing the same evolutionary ... differences that isolate it from the other wasp populations. " D. alloeum attacks only R. ...

Researchers observe evolution chain reaction

... and the subsequent modification of a parasitic wasp that feeds on it. The result is a chain ... between the flies and their associated wasp populations rather than fixed, all or none, ... species arise. "The Diachasma alloeum wasp that we studied is just one of several wasps that ...

New paper offers key insights into how new species emerge

... and colleagues demonstrate that the parasitic wasp Diachasma alloeum is evolving into a new ... Notre Dame researchers show that the Diachasma wasp that parasitizes Rhagoletis has also shifted to ... the apple as a new food resource. Indeed, the wasp has evolved many of the same types of ecological ...

Diversity among parasitic wasps is even greater than suspected

... A tiny wasp that lays its eggs under the skin of unwitting ... gets its name from its tiny abdomen. The wasp itself is quite small, about the size of the lead ... they attack. More than 90 percent of the wasp species were found to target only one or a very ...

Geisinger piloting innovative laboratory specimen processing instrument

... need for our lab services." Bourbeau said the wasp is a welcome addition to Geisinger's microbiology ... of specimens that are handled in our lab." The wasp processes swabs, urine, fecal samples and other ... transfer swabs into liquid solutions, the wasp can increase the amount of specimens that is ...

UCR-led research team uses tiny wasp to wipe out major agricultural pest in Tahiti

... glassy-winged sharpshooter. The tiny stingless wasp attacks glassy-winged sharpshooter eggs by ... through which the parasite lays its own egg. The wasp larva that hatches from the egg then eats the ... glassy-winged sharpshooter egg, killing it. The wasp larva completes its development inside the host ...

Wasp genetics study suggests altruism evolved from maternal behavior

... in Science Express. Like honey bee workers, wasp workers give up their reproductive capabilities ... he said. Rather than focus on the entire wasp genome, which would be costly, the research team focused on those genes that were expressed in wasp brains in high enough quantities to be detected ...

Old developmental pathways spawn revolutionary evolutionary changes

... insect societies. Because the biology and physiology of the Polistes wasp is more transparent, instead of highly derived as is often the case of ... larval life. However, Amdam points out that the primitive social Polistes wasp was originally believed to lack developmental castes entirely, and to be ...

Honeybees as plant 'bodyguards'

... fine sensory hairs on the front portions of their bodies that enable them to detect air vibrations, such as the sound of an approaching predatory wasp or honeybee. "These sensory hairs are not fine-tuned," Tautz said. "Therefore, caterpillars cannot distinguish between hunting wasps and harmless ...

Wasps and bumble bees heat up, fly faster with protein-rich food

... to nutritious food, both research teams conclude. Such similar responses found in two distantly related species a bumble bee and a yellowjacket wasp whose ancestral lines diverged millions of years ago suggest that the behavior is an ancestral trait. Bumble bees, but not yellowjackets, recruit ...

Scientists discover 356 animal inclusions trapped in 100 million years old opaque amber

... of 53% of the inclusions. Most of the organisms discovered are tiny. For example, one of the discovered acarians measures 0.8 mm and a fossil wasp is only 4 mm. The small size of the organisms is probably due to the fact that bigger animals would be able to escape from the resin before getting ...

Eat up all of your Brussels sprouts -- unless you're an aphid

... in an ecosystem known as a food web. This means that the sprouts affect not only the herbivore aphids that eat them, but also the primary parasitoid wasp predators that mummify and eat the aphids, and the secondary parasitoid wasps that in turn eat the primary parasitoid wasps. The scientific team ...

Scientists call for urgent research into 'real' impacts of invasive species

... where it has invaded. One example is the Rastrococcus mealybug which devastated mangoes in West Africa. CABI introduced a highly specific wasp from Asia, which proved extremely effective in controlling the mealybug. Natural control methods for other weed species such as Mikania micrantha ...

Transgenic maize is more susceptible to aphids

... good news." In fact, aphids produce honeydew, a sugar-rich substance that can be used as a food source by beneficial insects, such as the parasitic wasp Cotesia marginiventris. This parasitoid helps the plant when it is attacked by caterpillars. It kills these pests by laying its eggs in them. In ...

NHGRI targets 12 more organisms for genome sequencing

... prolixus); a pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum); a wasp (Nasonia vitripennis) and two related insect ... prolixus. Another insect, the parasitoid wasp Nasonia vitripennis, is a natural enemy of ... saves approximately $20 billion annually. The wasp will serve as a good comparison for the honey bee ...

Symbiotic bacteria protect hunting wasps from fungal infestation

... a fascinating symbiotic relationship between a wasp species and a newly discovered bacterial species ... utilize these bacterial symbionts to protect the wasp larvae against pathogenic fungi. Detrimental ... and Erhard Strohm: "Symbiotic Bacteria Protect wasp Larvae from Fungal Infestation" The other ...

Taking a bite out of a fellow worker helps wasps recruit new foragers

... behaviorist. Biting is a way that workers in a colony of the social wasp Polybia occidentalis recruit new foragers to gather water, food and ... an experiment in which he artificially removed active foragers from four wasp colonies to see how new foragers are recruited. He found that biting ...

NYU scientists identify how development of different species uses same genes with distinct features

... across species. The study is published in the latest issue of the journal Science. The researchers examined the fruit fly Drosophila and the wasp Nasonia as genetic model systems. Fruit flies?development is well-understood by biologists and therefore serves as an appropriate focus for genetic ...

Rearing an army to save wheat

... Grants; the Montana Board of Research and Commercialization Technology; and the BNSF Railway Foundation. However, the process of locating parasitic wasp populations for redistribution is inefficient, and having the ability to reliably mass produce these organisms would be an asset. Even a slight ...

Two studies on bee evolution reveal surprises

... about 65 million years. Danforth and Poinar's fossil provides strong evidence for a more remote ancestry. The fact that the bee fossil also has some wasp traits suggests an evolutionary link between wasps and bees. In a related study, published in the Oct. 10 issue of the Proceedings of the ...

New moth variety disarms plants guarded by selenium

... to related varieties, was not deterred from either laying eggs or feeding on the plant. Furthermore, the researchers found that a selenium-tolerant wasp (Diadegma insulare) in turn parasitizes the selenium-tolerant diamondback moth. Chemical analysis showed that the selenium-tolerant moth and ...

New genetic analysis forces re-draw of insect family tree

... mosquito (Anopheles gambiae), silk moth (Bombyx mori), flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum), honey bee (Apis mellifera) and sibling parasitic wasp species (Nasonia vitripennis and Nasonia giraulti). These insects represent the four major orders of holometabolous insects, beetles ...

Wasps queue for top job

... are to spawn their own young in the future, the lazier they become. The tests were carried out on the non-aggressive tropical hairy-faced hover wasp - Liostenogaster flavolineata. Both the wasp's rank and the size of the group were manipulated to show how these variables affected the amount of ...

The higher the hierarchy, the greater the aggression

... as the time available to inherit the ability to breed ran out in seasonal animals. These predictions were tested on field colonies of the paper wasp Polistes dominulus by recording aggression between all group members and then repeatedly removing the dominant wasps. When individuals were ...

Insect predation sheds light on food web recovery after the dinosaur extinction

... major species each showed more than one kind of mining. "The mines show great abundance and taxonomic breadth," said Wilf. "There are fly, wasp and moth mines on the sycamores. We have not seen this kind of saturation of a flora with insect feeding anywhere else in North America, even in the ...

New insight into machinery of immune cells' 'tentacles'

... have remained elusive," said Pendergast. "The prevailing dogma was that this function is mediated by a protein called WASp. However, mice lacking wasp can still form immunological synapses, so we proposed that there was another unidentified pathway that regulated the process." In their ...