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Tag: "caterpillars" at biology news

Amino acids in nectar enhance butterfly fecundity: A long awaited link

... from the University of Basel raised map butterfly caterpillars on both nitrogen poor and nitrogen rich stinging nettle. After the butterflies emerged, they were fed nectar with or without amino acids. Butterflies raised under natural, nitrogen poor larval food conditions laid more eggs when fed nectar containin...

Scientists find fossil proof of Egypt's ancient climate

... that might sound a bit like relying on wooly bear caterpillars to predict the severity of winter, the snails actually reveal clues about the climate and environment of western Egypt, lo those many years ago. They also could shed light on the possible role weather and climate played in the dispersal of humans "ou...

Butterfly migration could be largest known

...Vanessa cardui, spend the winter in the desert. As caterpillars turn into adults in the spring, they migrate north...fornia has created a bumper crop of plants for the caterpillars to eat, fuelling a population boom, Shapiro said. The butterflies take about three days to reach th...

Bugs, even 'bad' ones, can be educationally beneficial, new book says

... use in silk culture experiments. A few escaped as caterpillars and their descendants thrived, leading to rampant defoliation 20 years later. Such destruction has led people to devise various methods to exterminate bad bugs. "The least creative way to get rid of bad bugs is by using insecticides," Waldbauer sai...

The very defensive caterpillar

...antibody-mediated immune response, and research in caterpillars has recently shown that, instead, they produce pro...on a diet of antibiotics, hawkmoth (Manduca sexta) caterpillars were infected by non-pathogenic bacteria (E. coli), followed by exposure to a second, but lethal ins...

UF study first to quantify validity of DNA I.D. tool using marine snails

... "Scientists studying butterflies are able to link caterpillars to adults in the field without having to rear them in the lab anymore to see them pupate and grow up," he said. "They can just sequence the caterpillar and link it to the adult butterfly." Probably the most common application, for scientists and con...

Biotech cotton 8: Bugs 0

...have every single boll in the field infected." The caterpillars eat the seeds and damage the developing cotton fibers. In contrast, when the caterpillars eat Bt cotton, they die. Before the use of Bt cotton became widespread, pink bollworm was one of th...

K-State researchers study insects' immune system

...for Kanost's group is the transition from studying caterpillars to studying mosquitoes, which have a more direct i...d-feeding insects. Knowledge gained from examining caterpillars is being used to understand the mosquito's immune system, Kanost said. For a mosquito to bite one h...

Science's Breakthrough of the Year: Watching evolution in action

...volution in action among a number of animals, from caterpillars to crickets, and found that behavioral differences such as what to eat and when to mate may be enough to turn a single population into two species. These painstaking observations and other experiments showed that evolutionary studies are as relevant ...

Plants give pests sock in the gut

... helps the plants defend themselves from voracious caterpillars by disrupting the insects' ability to digest food,...n from Antigua. Researchers have found that when caterpillars fed on the insect-resistant plants, one enzyme -- Mir1-CP or maize insect resistance cysteine protea...

New possibilities to fight pests with biological means

...s of the Max Planck institute studied corn plants, caterpillars of the species Spodoptera littoralis (Egyptian cotton leaf worm) and parasitic wasps of the species Cotesia marginiventris. Deciphering the complex mix of scents that the plants release after damage offered clues as to which classes of enzymes might ...

Plants tell caterpillars when it's safe to forage

...e plant volatiles to home in on potential victims, caterpillars use variations in their host plant's volatile production to reduce the risk of unpleasant encounters with wasps. Now that they've established volatiles' importance in influencing foraging behavior, the researchers plan to determine which compounds ar...

Where have all the butterflies gone?

... dry "La Nina" winter, leaving little food for the caterpillars of the painted lady. Shapiro said that, as in previous dry winters, the painted lady butterflies had given up on trying to breed in the desert and headed north; a handful were seen in Davis on Feb. 11. Shapiro and his students have seen only one pain...

Most widely used organic pesticide requires help to kill

...routinely colonize the stomach and intestines. The caterpillars of moths and butterflies, for example, have anywhe...gut of gypsy moth caterpillars. Exposed to Bt, the caterpillars whose intestinal tracts had been cleared of their native microbial communities showed none of the ag...

Caterpillars tell us how bacteria cause disease

...ers of bacterial gene sequences by testing them in caterpillars to see how their immune systems respond. This new ...s laboratory bacterium which they then insert into caterpillars and other invertebrates to study their immune response. "We are very excited by the opportunitie...

Some caterpillers just don't want to grow up

...gy of Maculinea rebeli, a Lycaenid butterfly whose caterpillars live as parasites inside colonies of Myrmica ants,...his species' ecology is that only about 25% of the caterpillars complete development within one year. The rest are inactive in the first season and mature only afte...

Secret of worm's poison pill box protein could produce new natural insecticide

... protein seemed to specifically target the BBMV of caterpillars Pieris Brassicae ?(The cabbage white butterfly cat... which makes the XptA1 300 times more toxic to the caterpillars than it would be by itself. As well as helping collect together the three proteins and attach them t...

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