The widespread use of pesticides poses significant risks to food and environmental safety. Imidacloprid is one the most effective neuroactive neonicotinoid insecticides against a broad spectrum piercing–sucking pests. A rapid, efficient, high-throughput analysis method for determination imidacloprid was developed in four minor crops with six matrices (bamboo shoot, winter jujube, fresh dry D. o...

The current study aims to estimate the most frequent number of nucleoli in taxonomically interesting Fritillaria species. Silver nitrate staining is applied using a modified protocol 14 taxa and one hybrid from 17 populations Greece. This first report for all studied here. In general, ranges 0-8, with pontica F. theophrasti characterised by greatest observed nucleoli. results reinforce classifi...

Species living in highly fragmented landscapes often occur as metapopulations with frequent population turnover. Turnover rate is known to depend on ecological factors, such as population size and connectivity, but it may also be influenced by the phenotypic and genotypic composition of populations. The Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia) in Finland uses two host-plant species that...

The term extinction threshold refers to a critical value of some attribute, such as the amount of habitat in the landscape, below which a population, a metapopulation, or a species does not persist. In this paper we discuss the existence and behavior of extinction thresholds in the context of metapopulation models. We review and extend recent developments in the theory and application of patch ...

Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain multiple mating in females. One of them is bet hedging, that is avoiding having no or very few offspring in any given generation, rather than maximizing the expected number of offspring. However, within-generation bet hedging is generally believed to be an unimportant evolutionary force, except in very small populations. In this study, we derive pre...

The Kean–Barlow model predicts how the equilibrium distribution and abundance of a population may be affected by local rates of increase, dispersal, colonisation, and extinction. Here, the model is parameterised for three insects: the Glanville fritillary Melitaea cinxia in Åland, Finland, the ribbonwood aphid Paradoxaphis plagianthi in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the coxella weevil Hadramph...