Maculinea butterflies are parasites of Myrmica ant nests. The Alcon blue, Maculinea alcon, is unusual in that it parasitizes the nests of several Myrmica species, using M. rubra, M. ruginodis and M. scabrinodis as hosts in different parts of Europe. In Denmark it uses M. rubra and M. ruginodis, but never M. scabrinodis. Some populations use one of these species exclusively, despite the presence...

Many researchers investigating plant-insect interactions maintain their insect colonies on artificial diet and assume that salivary enzymes and elicitors remain representative of natural situations. These salivary elicitors, such as the enzyme glucose oxidase (GOX), play important roles in influencing plant defense responses. In fact, GOX has been implicated in suppressing induced nicotine-prod...

Direct and indirect effects of predators are highly variable in complex communities, and understanding the sources of this variation is a research priority in community ecology. Recent evidence indicates that herbivore community structure is a primary determinant of predation strength and its cascading impacts on plants. In this study, we use variation in herbivore community structure among pla...

An antimagic labeling of a graph G is bijection from the set edges E(G) to $$\{1,2,\ldots ,|E(G)|\}$$ , such that all vertex sums are pairwise distinct, where sum at u labels assigned incident u. A called when it has an labeling. Hartsfield and Ringel conjectured every simple connected other than $$K_2$$ conjecture remains open even for trees. Here, we prove caterpillars by means $$O(n \log n)$...

A multigraph is degree-splittable if it decomposes into two submultigraphs whose degree lists are the same, plus one leftover edge when the total number of edges is odd. We prove that a connected multigraph is degree-splittable if it has an even number of vertices of each odd degree. For caterpillars, we characterize the splittable caterpillars with diameter at most 4, provide a general suffici...

Caterpillars are an omnipresent component in modern terrestrial faunas. Not surprisingly, they represent important food source for larger animals. The oldest fossils of caterpillars known from the Cretaceous. Yet, so far, only nine possible Cretaceous specimens have been reported. Here we expand record by four new preserved 99 million-year-old Kachin amber Myanmar. cannot easily be interpreted ...