#beetle-parasitism

#beetle-parasitism

A study by researchers at the University of California Berkeley has found that ethanol is surprisingly common in floral nectar, the sugary fuel that keeps pollinators alive. Yeast feeding on those sugars produces trace amounts of alcohol, and in this study, it showed up in 26 of the 29 plant species sampled.

When Borkent stops working, biting midges risk becoming an orphan group, a term that taxonomists give for a branch of the web of life that is no longer being studied. It is a pattern playing out across the field, he says. I am one of the last few standing. It's crisis all around. As the taxonomic community ages, we are not being replaced.

These caterpillars use a surprisingly complex rhythm like a secret knock to convince the ants to come fetch them. That's according to research published on February 25 in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, which found that caterpillars can keep a beat called double meter that has so far been identified only in a couple of primates.

On a spring day in 1694, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek - the father of microbiology - used a magnifying lens to look at a candle through the dissected eye of a dragonfly. But instead of seeing 1 candle flame, he saw hundreds of tiny flames, repeated over and over. But spoiler alert - this is not how insects see. Hi, I'm Niba, and today we're going to explore how insects really see the world.