Learning is widely documented across animal taxa but studies stringently scrutinizing the causes of constitutive or operational variation of learning among populations and individuals are scarce. The ability to learn is genetically determined and subject to constitutive variation while the performance in learning depends on the immediate circumstances and is subject to operational variation. We...

BACKGROUND Arthropod biological control agents (BCAs) are commonly released for greenhouse vegetable insect pest management. Nevertheless, chemicals remain a necessary control tactic for certain insect pests and diseases and they can have negative impacts on BCAs. The compatibility of some formulated reduced risk insecticides (abamectin, metaflumizone and chlorantraniliprole) and fungicides (my...

Yerba mate is a plant of great socioeconomic importance in southern South America. Little has been published about the phytoseiid mite fauna of yerba mate. This paper presents information about the morphology and distribution of phytoseiid mites collected in yerba mate in the Ilópolis and Putinga counties of Brazil between 2002 and 2004. Four areas with of different forms of cultivation in ever...

Predatory phytoseiid mites have been intensively studied and surveyed in the last decades because of their economic importance as biocontrol agents of agricultural pests. However, many regions of the world remain unexplored and the diversity of the family worldwide is still fragmentary. Up to date no phytoseiid species have been collected in the southernmost part of the Earth down to latitude 4...