Accurate egg placement into or onto a living host is an essential ability for many parasitoids, and changes in associated phenotypes, such as ovipositor morphology and behaviour, correlate with significant host shifts. Here, we report that in the ichneumonid group of koinobiont spider-ectoparasitoids ("polysphinctines"), several putatively ancestral taxa (clade I here), parasitic on ground-dwel...

Three new species of oribatid mites of the genus Plonaphacarus, Plonaphacarus sidorchukae sp. nov., Plonaphacarus rybalovi sp. nov. and Plonaphacarus hamulus sp. nov., are described from Bale Mountains National Park (Afrotropical region, Ethiopia). Morphological and taxonomical remarks about Steganacarus (Steganacarus) sol and Steganacarus (Steganacarus) vestitus are presented.

In the context of climate change and species invasions, range shifts increasingly gain attention because the rates at which they occur in the Anthropocene induce rapid changes in biological assemblages. During range shifts, species experience multiple selection pressures. For poleward expansions in particular, it is difficult to interpret observed evolutionary dynamics because of the joint acti...

Two new species of chigger mites, Hyponeoculta monocoxalae sp. n. from bats and reptiles, and Perares nudosetosus sp. n. from bats, are described. The first finding of larvae of Tectumpilosum negreai Feider, 1983 in nature is reported from a bat collected at the type locality, and the description of this species is emended. Four species, Perates monops (Brennan et Jones, 1960), Parasecia manuel...

Filamentous viruses are common in nature and efficiently deliver - sometimes via aerosol - genetic material, viral proteins, and other factors to animals and plants. Aerosolization can be a severe physicochemical test of the stability of any filamentous assembly whether it is made from natural polymers such as viral proteins or synthetic polymers. Here, worm-like "filomicelles" that self-assemb...

SPIDER (Source for Production of Ions of Deuterium Extracted from a Rf plasma) is an ion source test bed designed to extract and accelerate a negative ion current up to 40 A and 100 kV whose first beam is expected by the end of 2016. Two main effects perturb beamlet optics during the acceleration stage: space charge repulsion and the deflection induced by the permanent magnets (called co-extrac...

to test whether they would remove experimentally infested pupae following methods of Boecking and Drescher (1992). In 1994, the hygienic colonies removed significantly more pupae infested with one mite per cell than the non-hygienic colonies. In 1995, there was no significant difference between the hygienic and non-hygienic colonies when one or two mites were introduced per pupa due to variatio...

© 2014 The Authors. doi: 10.2340/00015555-1661 Journal Compilation © 2014 Acta Dermato-Venereologica. ISSN 0001-5555 Mites are an important cause of human dermatosis. Al­ though clinical diagnosis is often simple for the clinician, the identification of the causative mite is often troublesome. The identification and eradication of the agent causing the eruption is crucial for the resolution of ...

Tetranychus urticae is a phytophagous mite that forms colonies of several thousand individuals. These mites construct a common web to protect the colony. When plants become overcrowded and food resources become scarce, individuals gather at the plant apex to form a ball composed of mites and their silk threads. This ball is a structure facilitating group dispersal by wind or animal transport. U...

In temperate climates, honey bees (Apis mellifera) survive the winter by entering a distinct physiological and behavioral state. In recent years, beekeepers are reporting unsustainably high colony losses during the winter, which have been linked to parasitization by Varroa mites, virus infections, geographic location, and variation across honey bee genotypes. Here, we review literature on envir...