The one molecule that turns grasshoppers into locusts.
Science News reveals the one chemical that transforms harmless, solitary insects into a crop-destroying, famine-triggering locust swarm: Now, scientists have pinpointed a compound emitted by […]
entomology
Insects are dying off – except those living in fresh water.
The Guardian has grim news for bugs (which include critters like the bees that pollinate our crops) with a little flash of hope. Insect populations […]
Nature: “How a fly came to love the vomit fruit”
You know, I went looking for some non-coronavirus science news, and Nature provided this gem of a headline about a plucky Drosophilia fruit-fly species and […]
How larvae leap long with no legs
Science News looks at high-speed photo research that reveals how a gall midge larva can leap up to 36 times its body length without any […]
Science Art: Plate LIL, Fig 3: Cepheus bifidatus Nymph, from British Oribatidae, 1884
Click to embiggen Mm. Mighty mite. From a this book of mites. Luckily for us, these mites (the Oribatidae) aren’t parasitic. They live in dirt […]
Science Art: Ichneumon Fly, from the USDA’s Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine, 1941
Click to embiggen “Lays eggs on larva boring in wood.” Add just one comma and that comes across as harsh criticism, but it’s really meant […]
We’ve discovered a tarantula with a horn on its back.
National Geographic has details that are bound to give arachnophobes THE WILLIES, but for the rest of us, there’s this rather large spider in Angola […]
Mathematical bees. The insect, not the competition. They know their numbers!
The Guardian demonstrates mathematical skills in creatures that don’t even have internal skeletons, with Australian research that shows bees handling some rather sophisticated calculations… for […]
Diet drugs can prevent malaria and encephalitis – by making mosquitos less hungry.
Nature reports on a lifesaving use for diet drugs: Female Aedes aegypti, like other mosquito species, feed on blood to get the protein they need […]
The honeybee’s greatest foe isn’t after their blood – it’s sucking their *fat*.
Science Daily puts the beekeeper’s foe, the varroa mite (believed to be a key player in Colony Collapse Disorder), in a new light. The parasite […]
Parasitic wasp makes zombie cockroaches.
That’s a string of creepiness there, isn’t it? Everybody knows (I hope) the way some parasitic wasps turn caterpillars into living meat lockers for their […]
Science Art: Introverted Millipede (Magukbaforduló ikerszelvényesek).
Click to embiggen This is an old, old fellow named Polydesmus. One of the first land animals there ever was. From the image’s description on […]
Mushrooms could save the bees. Maybe.
Wired shares the latest unexpected benefit from mushroom fundi Paul Stamets, who may have found a weapon to beat back CCD, the syndrome that’s devastating […]
This jungle wasp has a stinger almost as long as the rest of its body.
Science Daily introduces us to a newly discovered Amazonian wasp that’s singularly well-endowed in the stinger department: “The stinger of the new parasitoid wasp called […]
Science Art: De XII Afbeelding (Banana) by Maria Sibylla Merian
Click to embiggen At the end of the 17th century, this was some weird and wild stuff – a fruit that in the Americas, they […]