Plants are highly intelligent organisms. They continuously make distributed processing of sensory information, concurrent decision making and parallel actuation. The plants are efficient green computers per se. Outside in nature, the plants are programmed and hardwired to perform a narrow range of tasks aimed to maximize the plants’ ecological distribution, survival and reproduction. To ‘persua...

The root-to-root travel of the beneficial bacterium Azospirillum brasilense on wheat and soybean roots in agar, sand, and light-textured soil was monitored. We used a motile wild-type (Mot) strain and a motility-deficient (Mot) strain which was derived from the wild-type strain. The colonization levels of inoculated roots were similar for the two strains. Mot cells moved from inoculated roots (...

Pecan foliage is attacked by three species of aphids [Monellia caryella (Fitch), Melanocallis caryaefoliae (Davis), and Monelliopsis pecanis Bissell], resulting in damage that can reduce tree nut yield. In this study, we assayed the ovipositional response of the green lacewing Chrysoperla rufilabris (Burmeister) to M. caryella and M. caryaefoliae at high and low aphid densities and the developm...

As opposed to humans, insects rely heavily on an acute olfactory system for survival and reproduction. Two major types of olfactory proteins, namely, odorant-binding proteins (OBPs) and odorant receptors (ORs), may contribute to the selectivity and sensitivity of the insects' olfactory system. Here, we aimed at addressing the question whether OBPs highly enriched in the antennae of the southern...

Oviposition attractants could be used for monitoring as well as controlling mosquitoes by attracting them to lay eggs at chosen sites. In the present study, culture filtrates of seven bacterial species were tested for their attractancy against gravid females of Culex quinquefasciatus. When their oviposition active indices (OAI) were studied, the culture filtrates of Bacillus cereus and Pseudomo...

The floral phenology, pollination ecology and breeding systems of two sympatric early-divergent angiosperms, Goniothalamus tapisoides and G. suaveolens (Annonaceae) are compared. The flowers are protogynous and morphologically similar, with anthesis over 23-25 h. Both species are predominantly xenogamous and pollinated by small beetles: G. tapisoides mainly by Curculionidae and G. suaveolens ma...

Animals can be innately attracted to certain odorants. Because these attractants are particularly salient, they might be expected to induce relatively strong responses throughout the olfactory pathway, helping animals detect the most relevant odors but limiting flexibility to respond to other odors. Alternatively, specific neural wiring might link innately preferred odors to appropriate behavio...