Circadian patterns of activity are considered ubiquitous and adaptive, and are often invoked as a mechanism for temporal niche partitioning. Yet, comparisons of rhythmic behavior in related animal species are uncommon. This is particularly true of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), in which studies of whole-animal patterns of behavior are far outweighed by examinations of tissue-specific mole...

Most research on plant-pollinator communication has focused on sensory and behavioral responses to relatively static cues. Floral rewards such as nectar, however, are dynamic, and foraging animals will increase their energetic profit if they can make use of floral cues that more accurately indicate nectar availability. Here we document such a cue--transient humidity gradients--using the night b...

A new gregarious braconid parasitoid wasp of Euphorinae, Meteorus stellatus Fujie, Shimizu & Maeto sp. nov. , is described from the Ryukyu Islands in Japan, based on an integrative taxonomic framework. The phylogenetic position species within Meteorini was analyzed DNA fragments mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase 1 (CO1) and nuclear 28S rDNA genes. recovered as a member versicolor compl...

Egg parasitoids face unique developmental constraints. First, they have exceptionally limited resources to support themselves and their siblings through three life stages. Second, they develop within the physiological system of another species, which they modify to their own ends. We examined how these constraints affect the metabolic physiology of egg parasitism, and whether parasitoids retool...

C(18):juvenile hormone is quite soluble in water, yielding a monomeric solution greater than 10(-5) M. In vivo injection or addition of aqueous juvenile hormone to the hemolymph in vitro shows the complexation of juvenile hormone to a protein, as demonstrated by gel permeation chromatography and disc-gel electrophoresis. The protein has an apparent molecular weight of 3.4 x 10(4) and is present...

We test the morphology based hypothesis that the Western Palaearctic spurge hawkmoths represent two species, the Eurasian H. euphorbiae and Afro-Macaronesian H. tithymali. It has been suggested that these species merged into several hybrid swarm populations, although a mitochondrial phylogeography revealed substructure with local differentiation. We analysed a three-gene mt-dataset (889 individ...

This work represents an initial analysis of butterflies and day-flying moths the Gouraya National Park (Algeria). Forty-eight field-surveys were made between February 2011 January 2012, in three stations (the cliff, low matorral high matorral). It allowed us to identify 38 species, belonging 6 families: Lycaenidae (13 species), Nymphalidae (10 Pieridae (9 Papilionidae (2 Hesperiidae Zygaenidae ...

Two widely distributed in the Oriental region species of hawk moths, Elibia dolichus (Westwood, 1847) and Neogurelca hyas (Walker, 1856), are recorded from Laos for first time.