Crazy Ants Displace Fire Ants As Dominant Invasive Species

According to a University of Texas study, Crazy Ants may become the dominant invasive ant species displacing Fire Ants in the near future.

The ants secrete a compound that neutralizes the venom used by Fire ants. The venom of the fire ant is very powerful and even fatal. It is two to three times as toxic as DDT on a per weight basis. But because crazy ants have a natural defense against the venom and their sheer numbers, they can overcome the species in a head to head confrontation.

Crazy ants gained attention when Texas exterminator Tom Raspberry noticed these ants in a Pasadena chemical plant in 2002. He noticed that the species seem to keep multiplying even after extermination.

The ant colonies seem to have an unexplained attraction to electrical devices. Crazy ants are known to damage devices such as televisions and laptops. The ants will stream inside the device until they form a single moving mass that completes a circuit and shorts it.

They take over an area through sheer numbers. These ants can overtake beehives and destroy the colonies. Bird chicks are smothered and struggle to hatch. In South America, where scientists now believe the ants originated, they have been known to obstruct the nasal cavities of chickens and asphyxiate the birds. They even swarm into cows’ eyes.

With their natural defense against fire ants, scientists believe that crazy ants will displace fire ants in the Southern United States.

16 New Species of Wasps Discovered in the Nearctic Region

Alloxysta texana

Researchers have found 16 new species of wasps from the Nearctic region from specimens in the United States National Museum of Natural History and in the Canadian National Collection of Insects. Of the 16 discovered, seven of these have been described and illustrated.

Wasps are insects and cataloged under order Hymenoptera and suborder Apocrita. Contrary to belief, they are not related to bees or ants. Wasps prey on other insects. Some parasitic wasps are used as a deterrent against other pests in agricultural environments. Since they prey on just the pests, there is minimal crop damage caused by using them.

Most wasps are solitary and do not sting or attack humans. Only a few are aggressive such as the Yellow Jacket. Wasps are distinguishable from bees by their pointed lower abdomens and the narrow "waist," called a petiole, that separates the abdomen from the thorax. There are about 30,000 sub species of wasps identified to date.

The Nearctic zone includes most of North America as well as Greenland and the highlands of Mexico.

Commercial Sonic Devices Using Ultrasonic Frequencies Ineffective Against Bed Bugs

Studies initially show that ultrasonic bed bug repellers have no effect in the dispersion or eradication of these blood sucking insects.

Bed bug infestations have been in the news and have garnered much mainstream attention. From popular personalities to the common everyday person, no one is spared from these small blood sucking insects.

The bed bug (Cimex lectularius) are small wingless insects that feed on blood. They are guided to feed by the carbon dioxide exhaled by their victims. Although these bugs are associated to feed at night, they are not exclusively nocturnal.

Bed bugs does not cause any major illness. They do irritate the skin and can cause rashes or can be harmful for people with allergies. Most suffer psychological trauma more than anything when it comes to bed bugs.

Dung Beetles Use Dung As A Mobile Thermal Refuge For Thermoregulation

Dung beetles are also called scarab beetles. These are the same beetles worshiped by the ancient Egyptians. They believed that a giant dung beetle rolled the Sun across the sky and buried it at night.

They probably got the idea from observing that these beetles roll balls of manure across the plain and bury it under the ground. Dung beetles do this since they use these balls of dung for food or as a brooding ball where the female beetle will lay its eggs inside it. When the larvae hatches, they feed on the dung.

There are some dung beetles that feed on mushrooms, leaves, and fruits. Dung beetles that solely rely on dung as its food source, do not need to drink or eat anything else since all the nutrients are provided for by the dung.

Carnivorous Sundew Plant Drosera Glanduligera Use Tentacles To Capture Prey

Plants that source its nutrients from insects and other animals are carnivorous plants. These plants live in areas where the soil lacks the proper nutrients, such as nitrogen, necessary to grow. Instead of deriving these nutrients from the soil, these plants have adapted to capturing and consuming nearby organisms such as insects and arthropods for it.

They consume the prey by secreting digestive enzymes to break it down to the basic components and absorb the available nutrients.

There are around 630 species of true carnivorous plants and another 300 that show some of its characteristics.

Carnivorous plants capture prey using biological traps. These traps can be passive or active traps. Passive traps such as the "flypaper" plants trap foraging insects and arthropods in mucous. There are active traps such as snap traps that operates on a mechanism similar to a rat trap. Snap trap plants uses acid which allows its cells to expand and bend which helps it capture and digest its prey.

Despite the fact that these plants capture and digest prey for nutrients, they still require basic plant necessities such as soil, water, and sunlight. Carnivorous plants rarely die from not catching any prey.

Recent studies show that secretions of carnivorous plants can be used in the development of better anti-fungal medication.

Touch-sensitive tentacles catapult prey into carnivorous plant traps

Swift predators are common in the animal world but are rare in the plant kingdom. New research shows that Drosera glanduligera, a small sundew from southern Australia, deploys one of the fastest and most spectacular trapping mechanisms known among carnivorous plants.

The study, published Sep. 26 in the open access journal PLOS ONE, is a collaboration between the Plant Biomechanics Group at the University of Freiburg and private sundew cultivators from Weil am Rhein, and provides the first experimental demonstration of fast-moving snap tentacles in sundew plants propelling prey into the plant's leaf trap, where they are captured and digested. The authors also provide a biophysical explanation for the quick motion of these touch-sensitive tentacles.

Male Corn Earworm Moths, Helicoverpa Zea, Flies Too Soon During Courtship Race

By studying how female sex attractants make male moths warm up their flight muscles faster but take flight prematurely, University of Utah biologists are learning about how odor affects animal behavior.
Credit: José Crespo, University of Utah

The corn earworm can be found in temperate and tropical regions of the world. Mainly found in North America, it is a major agricultural pest. In their larvae stage, they are responsible for a large percentage of grade-out corn.

The species are identified by many different common names, depending on what the larva eats. Cotton bullworms are those that consume cotton. Corn eaters are called corn earworms. Tomato fruitworms are the larva that consumes tomatoes. The larva has also been known to consume many other crops.

Corn earworms regularly migrate into northern regions from southern regions depending on winter conditions.

Virgin male moths think they're hot when they're not

A University of Utah study found that when a virgin male moth gets a whiff of female sex attractant, he's quicker to start shivering to warm up his flight muscles, and then takes off prematurely when he's still too cool for powerful flight. So his headlong rush to reach the female first may cost him the race.

The study illustrates the tradeoff between being quick to start flying after a female versus adequately warming up the flight muscles before starting the chase. Until the next study, it remains a mystery which moths actually reach the females: the too-cool, quick-takeoff males or the males who wait until they're hot enough to take a shot. The latter may end up flying faster and more efficiently and win the race, despite a slow takeoff.

Study Show Bug Bombs And Foggers Have Minimal Effect Against Bed Bugs

Cimex Lectularius, are commonly called Bed Bugs. These are insects are about 1mm to 7mm small. They are flat and oval shaped to better squeeze into small tight spaces to avoid detection.

Bed bugs feed on sleeping people. Their bites are hardly felt and they are so small (around 1mm to 7mm) that they can hide in small crevices in the wall or bed frame. A thorough understanding of these pests is needed for proper bed bug control.

A home can suddenly be infested by bed bugs simply because it was brought there. Bed bugs can be carried from place to place by travelling thru clothing, suitcases, bags, or even in used furniture. Once settled in a home, they can travel up to 100 feet at night in search of sleeping victims.

Bug-bomb foggers are no match for bed bugs

New research shows foggers are ineffective against bed bugs

Consumer products known as "bug bombs" or "foggers" have been sold for decades for use against many common household insects. However, recent research published in the Journal of Economic Entomology (JEE) shows these products to be ineffective against bed bugs.

Heliconius Butterflies Survive By Acquiring and Sharing Genetic Data From Other Species

Common Postman (Heliconius melpomene)

A species is a group of organisms that can interbreed in nature to produce a fertile offspring. It is a unit of biodiversity or the degree of variation of organic life forms within a given species, ecosystem, biome, or an entire planet.

Within a group of species, new biological species may arise. This is called speciation. It is the splitting from a main branch of species to form an altogether new line.

One such such species being studied and used as models for speciation are the Heliconius butterflies. Hybrid speciation has been hypothesized to occur in this genus and may contribute to the diverse mimicry found in Heliconius butterflies. The species Heliconius Heurippa is said to be a hybridized version of two Heliconius species; Heliconius Cydno and Heliconius Melpomene. Hybrid speciation is a form of speciation wherein hybridization between two different closely related species such as the two heliconius butterfiles leads to a novel species; the heliconius heurippa.

This form of speciation is popular among plants but is considered extremely rare outside of the plant world.

Colorful butterflies increase their odds of survival by sharing traits

Bright black-and-red butterflies that flit across the sunlit edges of Amazonian rain forests are natural hedonists, and it does them good, according to genetic data published today in the journal Nature.

An international consortium of researchers at UC Irvine and elsewhere discovered that different species of the Heliconius butterfly are crossbreeding to more quickly acquire superior wing colors. They also have a surprisingly large number of genes devoted to smell and taste.

The use of color to attract mates and fend off predators is widespread in daytime-loving butterflies, while night-flying moths are famous for having large antennae to sniff out potential mates' pheromones. Thus, researchers predicted that because they're such visual creatures, the butterflies would not be able to smell or taste very well.