Lygus lineolaris is a pest of many economically important crops. While the species comprising the Peristenus pallipes complex are native parasitoids of L. lineolaris, they do not provide adequate biological control of L. lineolaris. As a result, the European parasitoid, Peristenus digoneutis, was introduced in forage alfalfa. Peristenus digoneutis successfully dispersed from forage alfalfa to s...

—We studied the breeding biology of the Baywing (Agelaioides badius), a shared host of Screaming (Molothrus rufoaxillaris) and Shiny (M. bonariensis) cowbirds. We monitored 193 nests from December 2002 to March 2007 in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Baywings used a wide variety of nesting sites, mainly old nests of furnarids. Their breeding season lasted from late November to February...

The effects of landscape fragmentation on nest predation and brood parasitism, the two primary causes of avian reproductive failure, have been difficult to generalize across landscapes, yet few studies have clearly considered the context and spatial scale of fragmentation. Working in two river systems fragmented by agricultural and rural-housing development, we tracked nesting success and brood...

Cyst nematodes are highly evolved sedentary plant endoparasites that use parasitism proteins injected through the stylet into host tissues to successfully parasitize plants. These secretory proteins likely are essential for parasitism as they are involved in a variety of parasitic events leading to the establishment of specialized feeding cells required by the nematode to obtain nourishment. Wi...

plant quality in herbivores’ diet may affect the performance of both herbivore and its parasitoids. in the present research, parasitism capacity of diadegma semiclausum (hellen) on plutella xylostella (l.) reared on different genetically manipulated brassica plants including the canola’s progenitor (brassica rapa l.), two cultivated canola cultivars (cultivar-opera and cultivar-rgs003), one hyb...

Fifteen years ago, DeLone and McLean published their original model of IS success, which received considerable attention in the literature. Given the widespread acceptance of the model, we conducted a meta-analysis to determine whether the model had been validated by research studies reported in the literature. By aggregating the results of 52 empirical studies that examined relationships withi...

The effects of anthropogenic forest disturbance on avian populations are only starting to be understood, with most research focusing on community richness and species abundance. Monitoring nesting survival is becoming an important and increasingly reliable method for assessing habitat quality. We investigated nest survival and Brown-headed Cowbird nest parasitism of 18 Neotropical migratory bir...

Recent studies have shown that Warbling Vireos (Vireo gilvus) are declining in California and that these trends are due to low reproductive success. Brood parasitism by Brown-headed Cowbirds (Molothrus ater) has been implicated in the low productivity. I explored two hypotheses related to population dynamics of Warbling Vireos along an elevational gradient: (1) potential source populations exis...

Despite increasing appreciation for parasitism as an important component of primate ecology and evolution, surprisingly few studies have demonstrated the costs of helminth parasitism in primates. Detecting parasite-related costs in primates is particularly difficult because it requires detailed, long-term data on individual host reproductive success, survival, and parasitism. The identification...