Bradley J. Cardinale*, Chad T. Harvey, Kevin Gross and Anthony R. Ives Department of Zoology, University of WisconsinMadison, Madison, WI 53706, USA [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] *Correspondence: E-mail: [email protected] Abstract The suppression of agricultural pests has often been proposed as an important service of natural enemy diversity, but few experiments have test...

In feeding, aphids inject saliva into plant tissues, gaining access to phloem sap and eliciting (and sometimes overcoming) plant responses. We are examining the involvement, in this aphid-plant interaction, of individual aphid proteins and enzymes, as identified in a salivary gland cDNA library. Here, we focus on a salivary protein we have arbitrarily designated Protein C002. We have shown, by ...

The soybean aphid (Aphis glycines Matsumura) is one of the most important insect pests of soybeans in the North-central region of the US. It has been hypothesized that aphids avoid effective defenses by inhibition of jasmonate-regulated plant responses. Given the role fatty acids play in jasmonate-induced plant defenses, we analyzed the fatty acid profile of soybean leaves and seeds from aphid-...

Many plant viruses depend on aphids and other phloem-feeding insects for transmission within and among host plants. Thus, viruses may promote their own transmission by manipulating plant physiology to attract aphids and increase aphid reproduction. Consistent with this hypothesis, Myzus persicae (green peach aphids) prefer to settle on Nicotiana benthamiana infected with Turnip mosaic virus (Tu...

The drive towards a more sustainable and integrated approach to pest management has engendered a renewed interest in conservation biological control, the role of natural enemy communities and their interactions with prey. Monoclonal antibodies have provided significant advances in enhancing our knowledge of trophic interactions and can be employed to help quantify predation on target species. T...

Seasonal occurrence of aphids and aphidophagous insects was monitored for six years (2006 2011) from full leaf expansion in May to leaf fall in October variety pecan trees that were not treated with insecticides. Aphid outbreaks occurred two times per season, once in the spring and again in the late summer. Yellow pecan and blackmargined aphids exceeded the recommended treatment thresholds one ...

Aphids possess several facultative bacterial symbionts that have important effects on their hosts' biology. These have been most closely studied in the pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum), a species that feeds on multiple host plants. Whether secondary symbionts influence host plant utilization is unclear. We report the fitness consequences of introducing different strains of the symbiont Hamiltone...

Fluxes of nutrients, energy and ions through forest canopies are spatially and temporally highly heterogeneous and good modelling tools are needed to separate different influential variables. Two important factors affecting the variation in the throughfall fluxes are the amount of precipitation and phytophagous insects in the canopy. In spite of their large abundance, wide distribution and prod...

Buchnera aphidicola is the primary endosymbiont of aphids with which it maintains an obligate mutualistic symbiotic relationship. Insects also maintain facultative symbiotic relationships with secondary symbionts, and Serratia symbiotica is the most common in aphids. The presence of both symbionts in aphids of the subfamily Lachninae has been widely studied by our group. We examined two closely...

Organic lettuce, Lactuca sativa L., growers on the Central Coast of California rely on conservation biological control to manage Nasonovia ribisnigri Mosley (Hemiptera: Aphididae) and other aphid pests of lettuce. In 2006, we carried out five replicated field trials to determine the importance of syrphid larvae in the suppression of N. ribisnigri and other aphids infesting organic romaine lettu...