Tag: "wasps" at biology news

NHGRI targets 12 more organisms for genome sequencing

...tions. In the United States, the use of parasitoid wasps in agriculture as a biological control of crop damaging insects saves approximately $20 billion annually. The wasp will serve as a good comparison for the honey bee genome, which has been sequenced already. Two related wasp species, Nasonia giraulti ...

The shape of things to come: Morphology database going global

...her who specializes in the evolutionary history of wasps is now creating a buzz about a new way for scientists to store, share and study plant and animal images. Fredrik Ronquist, a professor in the School of Computational Sciences, is one of the founders of MorphBank, an international Web database that c...

New possibilities to fight pests with biological means

...known as the Egyptian cotton leaf worm. Parasitic wasps use these plant scents to localize the caterpillar...mpounds that are released by the plant and attract wasps toward the damaged corn plant. Since this mechanism is based only on a single gene, it might be usef...

Insects that produce males from unfertilized eggs reveal a surprising cellular feat

...opment of centrosomes in the eggs of two parasitic wasps (Nasonia vitripennis and Muscidifurax uniraptor). Using fluorescently labeled antibodies that recognize and bind to gamma tubulin and other centrosomal proteins, they demonstrated the presence of these proteins in accessory nuclei and showed that the...

Researchers now able to look deep into heart to view triggers of a heart's beat

...opment of centrosomes in the eggs of two parasitic wasps (Nasonia vitripennis and Muscidifurax uniraptor). Using fluorescently labeled antibodies that recognize and bind to gamma tubulin and other centrosomal proteins, they demonstrated the presence of these proteins in accessory nuclei and showed that the...

Sociality of sweat bees evolved simultaneously during climate change

...er and sweat (halictid) bees, ants, termites, many wasps as well as certain kinds of shrimp and the naked m...ther social insects (such as ants, termites, paper wasps and honey bees) have reached 'a point of no return' in social evolution in which members of the line...

Viral hitchhiker inhibits Wolbachia bacteria's ability to proliferate

...with reduced bacterial growth. Then they bred the wasps and confirmed fewer incidences of cytoplasmic incompatibility in relation to the reduced presence of the bacteria and increased presence of the virus. "We're excited about these findings because there is a great deal of interest in deciphering the...

Plants tell caterpillars when it's safe to forage

...atile compounds that act as a magnet for parasitic wasps ( Cotesia marginiventris ), which deposit their eg... volatile chemicals increases during the day (when wasps are active) and decreases at night, suggesting that variations in production might affect the daily ...

Wasps queue for top job

...iversity College London) have discovered that even wasps are driven by their status. The study, published today in Nature, shows that lower-ranked female wasps work harder to help their queen than those higher up the chain because they have less to lose, and c...

Copying nature could save us energy, study shows

...the way desert cockroaches gather water to the way wasps bore a hole into a tree, nature has developed a myriad of ways of solving difficult problems. "By better understanding the way in which biology defines and solves technical problems, we can develop new approaches that could significantly reduce our ...

New genetic analysis forces re-draw of insect family tree

...example, social colonies are common among bees and wasps and their relatives, ants, as well as among more d...es independently. "Now that we know that bees, wasps and ants are in fact the closest relatives to the more distantly related (or 'basal') species, it ap...

Two studies on bee evolution reveal surprises

... 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 National Academy of Sciences, Danforth and several colleagues from other institutions examined early bees' structures in combination with bee DNA, producing the...

Rearing an army to save wheat

...wo-year study that involved mass-rearing parasitic wasps that attack wheat stem sawfly larvae that tunnel t...r as honey water increases the number of parasitic wasps produced in each cage. Another part of his thesis project examined whether using special ultraviolet...

Why do some queen bees eat their worker bee's eggs?

...ction theory. His hypothesis was that worker bees, wasps and ants do not reproduce because most workers are half sisters. Instead the workers favor the queen's male progeny, since she has mated with multiple males, ensuring variation in the species. According to this theory, a species where the mother quee...

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

... The research team’s results showed that flies and wasps employ most of the same genes and similar interact...r, bicoid is unique to flies and does not exist in wasps or other species: The study’s findings show that it takes several mRNAs localized in the egg to achi...

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