Tag: "moths" at biology news

Moths mimic sounds to survive

... a night sky filled with hungry bats, good-tasting moths increase their chances of survival by mimicking th... the sonar that bats use to locate prey, the tiger moths make ultrasonic clicks of their own. They broadcast the clicks from a paired set of structures call...

Breathing easy: When it comes to oxygen, a bug's life is full of it

...ory system since 1911 when August Krogh researched moths and grasshoppers. Krogh’s interest in oxygen delivery led him later to study blood perfusion in mammalian capillaries, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1920. But the advent of synchrotron x-rays, an advanced form of x-ray scan, has recentl...

Edge density key to controlling gypsy moth spread

...e U.S. Northeast. Native to Europe and Asia, gypsy moths are currently found from Maine to North Carolina a...festation boundaries. External colonies occur when moths hitch a ride on vehicles or other items relocated by people. Without an Allee effect, these colonie...

New moth variety disarms plants guarded by selenium

...ator plant, whereas related but selenium-sensitive moths accumulate selenium as selenocysteine. The latter form is toxic because of its ability to be incorporated into proteins. The authors outline a possible course of events in the evolution of selenium tolerance in the newly discovered diamondback mo...

To elude bats, a moth keeps its hearing in tune

It has been known for over 50 years that moths can hear the ultrasonic hunting calls of their noc... and colleagues at the University of Bristol (UK), moths are not as deaf as they had previously been supposed to be. The findings appear in the December 19th...

Most widely used organic pesticide requires help to kill

...ze the stomach and intestines. The caterpillars of moths and butterflies, for example, have anywhere from s...t take up residence in the intestinal tract. "In moths and butterflies, the complexity is much lower than in mammals, and even some other insects," Broderi...

New genetic analysis forces re-draw of insect family tree

...f insects. Scientists have found that flies and moths are most closely related to beetles and more dista... Previously scientists had assumed that flies and moths were most closely related to bees and wasps, with beetles more distantly related to these groups. ...

Gene needed for butterfly transformation also key for insects like grasshoppers

...he broad gene regulates metamorphosis in flies and moths and is found only at the transition between their larval and pupal stages. To understand how metamorphosis evolved in insects, the UW researchers examined how the broad gene functions in direct-developing insects, which don't have a pupal stage. "We...

Biotech cotton 8: Bugs 0

...on. The refuges ensure that the few pink bollworm moths that are resistant to Bt are most likely to mate with Bt-susceptible pink bollworm moths that grew up in the refuges. The offspring from such matings die when they eat Bt cotton. In contra...

New technique could alter field of mouse genetics

...erimentally as a tool to control pest insects from moths to flies and mosquitoes. The transposon has also seen heavy use in the genetic workhorse, Drosophila, where it is perhaps second only to the P element, whose talent to engineer changes in the fly's genome was co-discovered by Spradling 23 years ago. ...

Hanging baskets of sex and death help fruit growers

...ered in the virus which it then passes on to other moths when it does manage to have an actual encounter wi...y almost every element of an orchard to ensure the moths come into contact with virus. This is wasteful both of time and resources. By this method the moth t...

Insects develop resistance to engineered crops

...red moth populations in which a low percent of the moths were resistant to a single Bt toxin. The insects were then released into caged growing areas with either single-gene plants, dual-gene plants or mixed populations and allowed to reproduce for two years. The researchers found that after 26 generation...

What the eye doesn't see

... has long been used to explain how insects such as moths conceal themselves from predators, shaping the evo... the colours, size and location of patterns on the moths the team were able to mimic real tree characteristics and identify which pattern combinations were t...

Falling ants glide back to trunk to avoid dangers of forest floor

...creatures ranging from hummingbirds and lizards to moths and bees. "Apparently, it's fairly common among a lot of tropical canopy ants." Yanoviak, Dudley, a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, and zoologist Michael E. Kaspari, an ant ecologist at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, report the...

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