The coffee berry borer, Hypothenemus hampei (Ferrari) (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) is endemic to Africa and is the most devastating pest of coffee worldwide. The female bores a hole in the coffee berry and deposits her eggs inside. Upon hatching, larvae feed on the seeds, thus reducing both quality and yields of the marketable product. The coffee berry borer was found in the district of Kona on ...

The drug industry, powered by the huge profits of the 1980s, had lately embraced the concept of ‘strategic alliances’. Fervently in vogue, they were thought to solve a common problem: in a fractionated marketplace spanning countless diseases, an explosion in knowledge, and thousands of laboratories, no big company was big enough and no small one clever enough to go it alone. Berry Werth, The Bi...

The Oct. 10, 2015, suicide bomber attack at the village of Baga Sola in Chad killed and wounded dozens. Amid a long litany of terrible attacks launched by the Islamist group Boko Haram, this one was notable not so much for its severity, but for its perpetra- tors: one male, two females and two child bombers.

Aposematic coloration, a well-known phenomenon in animals, has been given little attention in plants. Here I discuss two types of conspicuousness of thorns which are typical of many plant species: (1) colorful thorns, and (2) white spots, or white and colorful stripes, associated with thorns in leaves and stems. Both types of aposematic coloration predominate the spine system of taxa rich with ...

Opsariichthys pachycephalus and Candidia barbatus are two phylogenetically related freshwater cyprinids that both exhibit colorful, yet quite different nuptial coloration. This study was designed to test the hypothesis that differences in nuptial coloration between two species could reflect differences in color perception ability and the opsin genes that coded for it. Genes encoding the visual ...

Elaborate, sexually dimorphic traits are widely thought to evolve under sexual selection through female preference, male-male competition, or both. The orangethroat darter (Etheostoma spectabile) is a sexually dichromatic fish in which females exhibit no preferences for male size or coloration. We tested whether these traits affect individual reproductive success in E. spectabile when multiple ...

We address the question of a Berry Esseen type theorem for the speed of convergence in a multivariate free central limit theorem. For this, we estimate the difference between the operator-valued Cauchy transforms of the normalized partial sums in an operator-valued free central limit theorem and the Cauchy transform of the limiting operator-valued semicircular element.

Recent evidence suggests that blue-green coloration of bird eggshells may be related to female and/or egg phenotypic quality, and that such colour may affect parental effort and therefore the nutritional environment of developing nestlings. Here we suggest that these relationships and the signal function of eggshell coloration would affect the outcome of coevolution between avian brood parasite...

Coloration of stinging insects is often based on contrasted patterns of light and black pigmentations as a warning signal to predators. However, in many social wasp species, geographic variation drastically modifies this signal through melanic polymorphism potentially driven by different selective pressures. To date, surprisingly little is known about the geographic variation of coloration of s...

Coloration is a trait frequently cited as important to ecological, and thus evolutionary, processes in amphibians. To fully understand the impact of coloration, a consistent method of color measurement is required, which is often achieved by collecting color information in a captive, laboratory setting. However, results from the lab can only be generalized to the field if coloration remains con...