True flies are insects of the order Diptera and encompass one of the most diverse groups of animals on Earth. Within dipterans, Schizophora represents a recent radiation of insects that was used as a model to develop a pipeline for generating complete mitogenomes using various sequencing platforms and strategies. 91 mitogenomes from 32 different species were sequenced and assembled with high fi...

Within many species, males are often more heavily parasitised than females. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, including immunocompetence handicaps, sexual size dimorphism and behavioural differences. Here we set out to test the latter two hypotheses and make inferences about the former by assessing patterns of ectoparasitism across various life-history stages in ...

The reconstruction of ancient insect ectoparasitism is challenging, mostly because of the extreme scarcity of fossils with obvious ectoparasitic features such as sucking-piercing mouthparts and specialized attachment organs. Here we describe a bizarre fly larva (Diptera), Qiyia jurassica gen. et sp. nov., from the Jurassic of China, that represents a stem group of the tabanomorph family Atheric...

While anthropogenic impacts on parasitism of wildlife are receiving growing attention, whether these impacts vary in a sex-specific manner remains little explored. Differences between the sexes in the effect of parasites, linked to anthropogenic activity, could lead to uneven sex ratios and higher population endangerment. We sampled 1108 individual bats in 18 different sites across an agricultu...

Examples of immunological reactions to arthropod parasites include responses by hosts to the following stimuli: excretory and secretory antigens produced by myiasis-producing larvae or skin-dwelling (mange) mites salivary antigens of blood-sucking arthropods. In many cases, these are hypersensitivity reactions, which often appear not to produce very deleterious effects on the parasites. However...

Our manuscript shows infestation of the different population (by age groups, and by sex) with endoparasites and ectoparasites from 1996 till 2010, through seasons (spring, summer, autumn, winter).Parasitological examinations which were done at "Public health Institute" of Osjecko-baranjska county, and which were done at total of 3667 patients, were the methods of direct parasitological diagnost...

1. Several authors have proposed that inter-speci®c variation in parasitoid life histories can be classi®ed according to a dichotomy of development modes: ectoparasitoids and idiobionts with one suite of traits, and endoparasitoids and koinobionts with an opposing set of traits. 2. The factual evidence for such a dichotomy is presently scant. Here, 10 predictions of the dichotomous hypothesis a...

When blood-feeding parasites increase seasonally, their deleterious effects may prevent some host species, especially those living in large groups where parasites are numerous, from reproducing later in the summer. Yet the role of parasites in regulating the length of a host's breeding season-and thus the host's opportunity for multiple brooding-has not been systematically investigated. The hig...

It is suggested that descriptive taxonomy of thrips must be integrated into biological studies if we are to understand patterns of evolutionary and ecological diversity. Collecting and describing new taxa is easy, but understanding their position in ecosystems and how they have contributed to the origin and maintenance of biological diversity is more important yet more difficult. Many authors f...