True bugs are insects of the order Hemiptera, characterized by piercing-sucking mouthparts (a segmented rostrum or beak) adapted for feeding on plant sap, animal fluids, or predigested materials. Hemipterans exhibit hemimetabolous development (egg, nymph, adult) and typically possess forewings modified into hemelytra, with a basal thickened region and a membranous distal portion, although some groups are fully membranous or secondarily wingless. The order includes diverse subgroups such as aphids, cicadas, shield bugs, and assassin bugs, occupying terrestrial and aquatic habitats and playing key ecological roles as herbivores, predators, and disease vectors in both natural and managed ecosystems.
Researchers from Kiel University and Trier University have shown, for the first time, that a widely used deworming product for grazing animals doesn't just harm individual plants and insects but also alters entire networks ...
Ecology
Aug 6, 2026
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Butterflies are charismatic, colorful and cherished around the world. One of the most diverse groups of insects, with more than 19,000 described species, they inspire international organizations such as the North American ...
Evolution
Aug 3, 2026
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Researchers at National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), in collaboration with researchers from The University of Electro-Communications (UEC) and Akita Prefectural University, have discovered ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jul 2, 2026
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Bumblebees are only an inch long, but they help power the global food system. Roughly one-third of the food we grow depends on pollinators like bees—and those bees are regularly decimated by pesticides.
Ecology
Jun 23, 2026
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What if a single sentence could carry two completely different meanings, one when read forward and another when read backward? In a new study, researchers at Arizona State University have discovered a biological version of ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Jun 17, 2026
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An unusually mild winter followed by a wet spring made last year one of the worst in a decade for Pennsylvania soybean growers. It wasn't the soybeans that were the problem; it was the slugs. The pests survived the warm winter ...
Agriculture
Apr 13, 2026
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Cassava is a starchy, tuberous root, introduced to sub-Saharan Africa by Portuguese traders centuries ago. It is a nutrition lifeboat for over 800 million people worldwide.
Ecology
Mar 18, 2026
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Mussels baked by the billions. Insect larvae cooked inside scorched cherries. Baby birds plummeted to their deaths from their overheating nests. But some species did just fine during the 2021 North American heat wave, according ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 11, 2026
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Humans tend to fear bed bugs, and rightly so. The bloodsuckers are tough to get rid of once they've entered a home. But new research has, for the first time, identified one thing the bugs seem to fear—water and wet surfaces.
Ecology
Feb 21, 2026
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Many insects rely on heritable bacterial endosymbionts for essential nutrients that they cannot get through their diet. A new study, published in Nature Communications, indicates that the genomes of these symbiotic bacteria ...
