Cotton has lost many ancestral defensive traits against key invertebrate pests. This is suggested by the levels of resistance to some pests found in wild cotton genotypes as well as in cultivated landraces and is a result of domestication and a long history of targeted breeding for yield and fiber quality, along with the capacity to control pests with pesticides. Genetic modification (GM) allow...

Pesticide resistance is the ability of a pest to survive normally lethal rates of a pesticide. The ability to develop resistance to a wide range of pesticides is a widespread phenomenon among the mites, so it was almost inevitable that varroa would become resistant against the commonly used acaricides such as the pyrethroids, taufluvalinate (Apistan) and flumethrin (Bayvarol). Studies found tha...

Interactions between pollutants and suboptimal environmental conditions can have severe consequences for the toxicity of pollutants, yet are still poorly understood. To identify patterns across environmental conditions and across fitness-related variables we exposed Enallagma cyathigerum damselfly larvae to the pesticide chlorpyrifos at two food levels or at two temperatures and quantified four...

onion thrips, thrips tabaci, is the most important pest of onion in isfahan. onion growers often rely on the pesticide spraying. imidacloprid is frequently used against this pest. to investigate the thrips resistance to this insecticide, 10 onion-growing regions of isfahan were selected. after their laboratory rearing, certain concentrations of imidacloprid were applied to these populations, us...

BACKGROUND Although evolution is the driving force behind many of today's major public health and agriculture issues, both journalists and scientific researchers often do not use the term "evolve" in discussions of these topics. METHODS In a total of 1,066 articles and 716 papers selected from 25 US newspapers and 34 scientific journals, we assess usage of the word "evolve" and its substitute...

BACKGROUND Agricultural pesticides may play a profound role in selection of resistance in field populations of mosquito vectors. The objective of this study is to investigate possible links between agricultural pesticide use and development of resistance to insecticides by the major malaria vector Anopheles arabiensis in northern Sudan. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Entomological surveys wer...