INTRODUCTION Soldiers in field units of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are susceptible to injury by various poisonous animals during training and operations. Bites and envenomations by animals such as snakes, scorpions, and spiders can be painful and debilitating, and at times life-threatening. We have examined the extent of exposure of IDF soldiers to snake and arthropod bites and the morbidi...

The high tree diversity of subtropical forests is linked to the biodiversity of other trophic levels. Disentangling the effects of tree species richness and composition, forest age, and stand structure on higher trophic levels in a forest landscape is important for understanding the factors that promote biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Using a plot network spanning gradients of tree dive...

The few studies that have addressed past effects of climate change on species distributions have mostly focused on plants due to the rarity of historical faunal baselines. However, hyperdiverse groups like Arthropoda are vital to monitor in order to understand climate change impacts on biodiversity. This is the first investigation of ground-dwelling arthropod (GDA) assemblages along the full el...

Birds serve as reservoirs for at least 10 arthropod borne viruses of wildlife and human concern (e.g. West Nile virus, Western Equine Encephalitis) and greater knowledge of the immune system dynamics of avian hosts and their disease vectors will have obvious economic benefits to agricultural, wildlife and human health interests. The more we begin to understand the host-vectorpathogen interactio...

The Advanced/Policy Track of the 2004 Kaiser Permanente Evidence-Based Medicine Symposium was an interactive session that focused on developing evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. The hypothetical scenario involved the imaginary drug "Memoryboost," a treatment for dementia. The participants were given materials describing the national Kaiser Permanente (KP) methodology for developing e...

Wolbachia are intracellular bacteria that manipulate the reproduction of their arthropod hosts in remarkable ways. They are predominantly transmitted vertically from mother to offspring but also occasionally horizontally between species. In doing so, they infect a huge range of arthropod species worldwide. Recently, a statistical analysis estimated the infection frequency of Wolbachia among art...

BACKGROUND By the end of this century, the potential climate-biome of the southern Kenai Peninsula is forecasted to change from transitional boreal forest to prairie and grasslands, a scenario that may already be playing out in the Caribou Hills region. Here, spruce (Picea × lutzii Little [glauca × sitchensis]) forests were heavily thinned by an outbreak of the spruce bark beetle (Dendroctonus ...

The elemental defense hypothesis proposes that some plants hyperaccumulate toxic elements as a defense mechanism. In this study the effectiveness of selenium (Se) as an arthropod deterrent was investigated under field conditions. Arthropod loads were measured over two growing seasons in Se hyperaccumulator habitats in Colorado, USA, comparing Se hyperaccumulator species (Astragalus bisulcatus a...

The planting of transgenic crops expressing Bacillus thuringiensis endotoxins is widespread throughout the world; the prolific increase in their application exposes nontarget organisms to toxins designed to control pests. To date, studies have focused upon the effects of Bt endotoxins on specific herbivores and detritivores, without consideration of their persistence within arthropod food webs....