Surprising symbiosis: Glassy-winged sharpshooter eats with friends
...hreesome came as a surprise. Many insects, such as aphids and cicadas, feed on the sap from a plant's xylem or phloem, pipes that transport water and food within a plant. These sap-feeders are often known to rely on resident bacteria for a balanced diet ?especially the synthesis of the "essential" amino-aci...A bug's life: Exceptional genomic stability yet rapid protein evolution in a carpenter ant mutualist
...chins, and in specialized cells of insects such as aphids and tsetse flies. Many symbiotic relationships are obligate; neither the bacterium nor its host can live without the other. Wernegreen's group focused on the bacterium Blochmannia, which has lived inside Camponotus and related ant genera for the pas...... often much more sophisticated than expected. When aphids are attacked by predators such as ladybird beetles...farnesene, that has long been known to cause other aphids to walk around or drop from the plant. In a paper soon to appear in Ecology Letters, researchers at...