Chinese caterpillar fungus (Ophiocordyceps sinensis) has been widely used as tonic in Asian medicine. Considering its curative effect and high cost, various counterfeit versions of O. sinensis have been introduced and are commercially available. These counterfeits have morphological characteristics that are difficult to distinguish based on morphology alone, thereby causing confusion and threat...

Direct and indirect effects of predators are highly variable in complex communities, and understanding the sources of this variation is a research priority in community ecology. Recent evidence indicates that herbivore community structure is a primary determinant of predation strength and its cascading impacts on plants. In this study, we use variation in herbivore community structure among pla...

Let G be a graph. The first Zagreb M1(G) of graph G is defined as: M1(G) = uV(G) deg(u)2. In this paper, we prove that each even number except 4 and 8 is a first Zagreb index of a caterpillar. Also, we show that the fist Zagreb index cannot be an odd number. Moreover, we obtain the fist Zagreb index of some graph operations.

The pioneer tree Macaranga in SE Asia has developed manyfold associations with ants. The genus comprises all stages of interaction with ants, from facultative relationships to obligate myrmecophytes. Only myrmecophytic Macaranga offer nesting space for ants and are associated with a specific ant partner. The nonmyrmecophytic species are visited by a variety of different ant species which are at...

We describe an implementation in Carpenter's typed feature formalism, ALE, of a discourse grammar of the kind proposed by Scha, Polanyi, et al. We examine their method for resolving parallelism-dependent anaphora and show that there is a coherent feature-structural rendition of this type of grammar which uses the operations of prwrity union and generalization. We describe an augmentation of the...

Wild pigs were established around coastal Spanish settlements in California in the 1800s and expanded over the last century by hunting introductions, domestic releases, and natural dispersal. The current distribution of wild pigs is closely associated with oak woodlands where foraging and rooting by the species may impinge on many native species. Rooting disturbance by wild pigs may be especial...

Evolutionary theory yields many important insights into why organisms are the way they are. However, for any given problem, there is significant uncertainty about what level of abstraction is appropriate. With such issues in mind, I will discuss an evolutionary scenario concerning the size and development time of a particular species of caterpillar, the tobacco hornworm. A larva of this species...

Various families of tolerance graphs of subtrees for specific families of host trees and tolerance functions have been successfully characterized. For example, chordal graphs are intersection (tolerance 1) graphs of subtrees of general trees, see [2], [5], and [8]. Intersection graphs of subtrees of a path are those that are chordal and do not contain an asteroidal triple, see [7]. We denote by...

This paper presents an architecture for a testenvironment for algorithms and control schemes in the field of collaborative robotics and swarm intelligence. As the foundation of the testenvironment, small bionically inspired robots are presented. The robots are small (20 cm x 5 cm x 5 cm) and lightweight (< 200 g). Their design is inspired by the movement of caterpillars. Three cubical segments ...

Food plant recognition in lepidopterous larvae is predominantly governed by the activity of eight taste neurones present in two sensilla styloconica located on each maxilla. This paper reviews the results of electrophysiological and behavioural studies made on various caterpillar species during the last 40 years. It appears that all species, even closely related ones, have different taste syste...