Background: The mungbean/green gram is one of the major grain legume crops native to Indian subcontinent, which was found damaged extensively by pulse beetle, Callosobruchus maculatus during storage. Moreover, insect damage also causes chemical constituents seeds leading alteration in flavor, nutritive value, marketability and acceptability stored seeds. Therefore, present investigation focused...

Extensive mortality of whitebark pine, beginning in the early to mid-2000s, occurred in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) of the western USA, primarily from mountain pine beetle but also from other threats such as white pine blister rust. The climatic drivers of this recent mortality and the potential for future whitebark pine mortality from mountain pine beetle are not well understood, y...

In many stage-structured species, different life stages often occupy separate spatial niches in a heterogeneous environment. Life stages of the giant flour beetle Tribolium brevicornis (Leconte), in particular adults and pupae, occupy different locations in a homogeneous habitat. This unique spatial pattern does not occur in the well-studied stored grain pests T. castaneum (Herbst) and T. confu...

I. Cross-mating of various populations of Pycvnotcs obtained from laboratory insect cultures demonstrated that the strawitch mite is a single, widely dispersed species, different from P.z~cntricoszts, which was probably associated with the furniture beetle. 2. P.ventricoszcs should not be the approved scientific name for the straw itch mite. The correct name for the straw itch mite is Pj?en~otc...

A novel approach to Bayesian Reinforcement learning (RL) named Beetle has recently been presented; this approach nicely balances exploration vs. exploitation while learning is performed online. This has produced an interest into experimental results obtained from the Beetle algorithm. This thesis gives an overview of bandit problems and modi es the Beetle algorithm. The new Beetle Bandit algori...

A microsporidium that closely resembles Paranosema species at the level of the light microscope was isolated from the rusty grain beetle, Cryptolestes ferrugineus. It's identity as Nosema oryzaephili (originally described from Oryzaephilus surinamensis) was confirmed by comparison with a known isolate of N. oryzaephili based on spore size, small subunit rDNA sequence, and relative infectivity t...

The Andean grain, quinoa, Chenopodium quinoa Willd. (Caryophyllales: Amaranthaceae), is gaining increasing attention as a future food and fodder crop in Denmark and other parts of Europe. Prior to 2005, pest problems in the crop were negligible in Denmark, however native insects may become adapted to this new host. Herbivores feeding on the closely related and very common weed in arable crops C...

The red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum (Herbst) (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae) has had a long association with human stored food and can be a major pest in anthropogenic structures used for the processing and storage of grain-based products. Anthropogenic structures are fragmented landscapes characterized by spatially and temporally patchy resources. Here we investigate the ability of female T....