Interspecific competition has been identified as a major structuring force in phytophagous arthropod communities. We would expect to find particularly strong competitive effects in communities with outbreaking components, where the joint food resource is depleted by a single super-abundant species. To assess how arthropod assemblages of the trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides, Salicaceae) resp...

Tephritid fruit flies, or "true" fruit flies (Diptera, Tephritidae) include approximately 500 genera and 4800 valid species (Norrbom 2004), whose vast majority (95%) is represented by phytophagous species (reviewed in Aluja and Norrbom 1999). Among them, frugivorous flies represent approximately 25–30% of all tephritid species, occur in tropical and temperate regions of all continents except th...

Though for a long time it was hypothesized that the extraordinary diversity of phytophagous insects was better explained by a synchronous pattern of co-diversification with plants, the results of recent studies have led to question this theory, suggesting that the diversification of insects occurred well after that of their hosts. In this study we address this issue by investigating the timing ...

The role of carabid beetles in reducing populations of phytophagous insects has been an elusive subject. A field experiment was established on a commercial wheat crop (cv. Otto) with an area of 4.5 ha in Valdivia, Chile, during the spring and summer of 1996-1997. The field had been under a prairie system for two years, before wheat sowing (fertilization and a pesticide had been applied during c...

The radiation of flowering plants in the mid-Cretaceous transformed landscapes and is widely believed to have fuelled the radiations of major groups of phytophagous insects. An excellent group to test this assertion is the scale insects (Coccomorpha: Hemiptera), with some 8,000 described Recent species and probably the most diverse fossil record of any phytophagous insect group preserved in amb...

We examine the evolution of host specificity for species of Telorchis, using the methods developed by researchers studying phytophagous insect-plant systems. Optimization of "generalist" compared with "specialist" onto the phylogeny for Telorchis revealed ambiguous patterns, depending on how the 2 terms were defined. Regardless of that definition, most of the evolutionary diversification of thi...

The cultivation of tropical fruit trees has grown considerably in the state of Bahia, northeastern Brazil. Some of these have been severely attacked by phytophagous mites, which are usually controlled by the use of chemical pesticides. However, there is today a growing interest for the adoption of less aggressive measures of pest control, as for example the use of predatory mites. Most of the p...