The response of tropical fauna to landscape-level habitat change is poorly understood. Increased conversion of native primary forest to alternative land-uses, including secondary forest and exotic tree plantations, highlights the importance of assessing diversity patterns within these forest types. We sampled 1848 moths from 335 species of Arctiidae, Saturniidae and Sphingidae, over a total of ...

Water is a critical resource for any terrestrial animal, especially for a soft-bodied insect such as larvae of the tobacco hornworm, Manduca sexta L. (Lepidoptera: Sphingidae). Strategies for coping with a dry environment might include seeking out regions of high relative humidity that reduce desiccative stress, or to find and imbibe liquid water. Desiccated larvae placed in a linear arena with...

Tympanal sound receptors in moths evolved in response to selective pressures provided by echolocating insectivorous bats. The presence of these ultrasound detectors also set the stage for the later evolution of ultrasonic courtship signals in the tympanate moth families. Male moths have repeatedly exploited the bat-detection mechanisms in females for the purpose of finding, identifying and obta...

A list of 31 species hawk moths from the territory Azerbaijan is given, based on collection materials Institute Zoology National Academy Sciences (Baku) and Georgian Museum (Tbilisi). Distribution maps for 27 are provided.

Specimens collected from eggs of the cassava hornworm Erinnyis ello, originally identified as T. demoraesi, were compared with the paratype of this species. Based on morphological analysis, the specimens from E. ello actually belong to Trichogramma marandobai Brun, Moraes and Soares, 1986. Therefore, T. demoraesi is not a parasitoid of the eggs of E. ello, a major pest of cassava. The main feat...

MAIN OBJECTIVE We examine the extent of taxonomic and biogeographical uncertainty in a well-studied group of Australian Lepidoptera, the hawkmoths (Sphingidae). METHODS We analysed the diversity of Australian sphingids through the comparative analysis of their DNA barcodes, supplemented by morphological re-examinations and sequence information from a nuclear marker in selected cases. The resu...

A novel trypsin inhibitor purified from chan seeds (Hyptis suaveolens, Lamiaceae) was purified and characterized. Its apparent molecular mass was 8700 Da with an isoelectric point of 3.4. Its N-terminal sequence showed a high content of acidic amino acids (seven out of 18 residues). Its inhibitory activity was potent toward all trypsin-like proteases extracted from the gut of the insect Prostep...