Insects are the largest group of animals in world—there over a million species insects, and they live just about everywhere! provide essential services for us ecosystems, such as pollination, nutrient recycling, pest control. Yet, most pay little attention to insects. Worryingly, insects also face many threats and, across globe, their populations at risk. Understanding importance is vital prote...

When counting-like abilities were first described in the honeybee in the mid-1990s, many scholars were sceptical, but such capacities have since been confirmed in a number of paradigms and also in other insect species. Counter to the intuitive notion that counting is a cognitively advanced ability, neural network analyses indicate that it can be mediated by very small neural circuits, and we sh...

Researchers interested in biodiversity could make no better start than with insects. A new illustrated book looks at the extremes in these species, highlighting just how diverse and numerous these animals are. “Through looking at insects,” the author Richard Jones says, “you can study the world — the whole natural environment — far better than you can by looking at humans. In fact, there’s a lo...

Edible insects may be a source of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFA). The aim of this article is to test for differences in aquatic and terrestrial insects used in human nutrition. We implemented linear models and discovered that differences in the proportion of LC-PUFA between aquatic and terrestrial insects do exist, with terrestrial insects being significantly richer in particu...

■ Abstract Reproductive-skew theory can be broadly divided into transactional models, in which reproduction is shared among group members in return for some fitness benefit, and tug-of-war models, in which reproductive sharing arises solely from an inability of each group member to fully control the others. For small-colony social insects in which complete reproductive control by a single indiv...

What are scale insects? Scale insects (Hemiptera: Sternorrhyncha: Coccoidea) are a group of small, plant feeding insects closely related to aphids and whiteflies. They are characterized by their unusual shapes, so much so that it is sometimes hard to recognize them as insects or even as animals! Adult females hardly ever move, lacking wings and often even legs. Instead of being able to run away...

BACKGROUND This article presents the links between technique, commerce and consumption in fishing for zazamushi, a mixture of aquatic insect larvae sold as food souvenirs in Japan. Since zazamushi are mainly collected for economic reasons, we suggest that demand for them has incited technical development among collectors in order to fish more insects. METHODS Several fishermen and traders wer...

“All models are wrong but some are useful" [1]. We address the problem of identifying which diagnosis models are more useful than others. Models are critical to diagnostics inference, yet little work exists to be able to compare models. We define the role of models in diagnostics inference, propose metrics for models, and apply these metrics to a tank benchmark system. Given the many approaches...

An analysis of the climate parametrization scheme adopted by conventional forest gap models revealed that most models assume a constant climate and are difficult to calibrate consistently. Tree growth showed unrealistically sensitive threshold effects along ecological gradients of temperature and precipitation. A new parametrization was compared with its predecessors in terms of the model's cap...

Title: Oscillometric measure of blood pressure detects association between orthostatic hypotension and depression in population based study of older adults Author's response to reviews: see over Dear Sir/Madam The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their comments and suggestions with regard to the manuscript entitled 'Oscillometric measure of blood pressure detects association betwee...