It's a boy: Controlling pest populations with modified males

Populations of New World screwworm flies - devastating parasitic livestock pests in Western Hemisphere tropical regions - could be greatly suppressed with the introduction of male flies that produce only males when they mate, ...

Breaking through insect shells at a molecular level

With their chitinous shells, insects seem almost invulnerable – but like Achilles' heel in Greek mythology, their impressive armor can still be attacked. Researchers at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig studied fruit ...

Understanding the fruit fly's nose

How odours influence actions is one of the fundamental questions in neuroscience. Richard Benton, associate professor at the Center for Integrative Genomics at the University of Lausanne, follows the molecular trail of chemical ...

Flies that pollinized Cretaceous plants 105 million years ago

When we think about pollination, the image that comes first to mind is a bee or a butterfly covered by pollen. However, in the Cretaceous —about 105 million years ago— bees and butterflies did not exist, and most terrestrial ...

Insect mating behavior has lessons for drones

Male moths locate females by navigating along the latter's pheromone (odor) plume, often flying hundreds of meters to do so. Two strategies are involved to accomplish this: males must find the outer envelope of the pheromone ...

Picking up on the smell of evolution

UA researchers have discovered some of the changes in genes, physiology and behavior that enable a species to drastically change its lifestyle in the course of evolution.

page 4 from 11