All entomology stories

Fruit fly bouts show gender-specific styles

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 09:17:52 -0400

Fighting like a girl or fighting like a boy is hardwired into fruit fly neurons, according to a study in the Nov. 19 Nature Neuroscience advance online publication by a research team from Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna. The results confirm that a gene known as "fruitless" is a key factor underlying sexual differences in behavior. The findings mark a milestone in an unlikely new animal model for understanding the biology of aggression and how the nervous system gives rise to different behaviors.

Beetles' past tells volumes about tropical evolution

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 09:47:25 -0400

Experts seeking to explain the amazing diversity of the tropical rain forest have typically done so in two ways, viewing forests as either "evolutionary cradles" that encourage the rapid development of new species, or as "evolutionary museums" that allow species to accumulate over time.

New work by Harvard researchers on tropical beetles indicates that both views are right.

Ants are surprisingly ancient, arising 140-168 million years ago

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:26:16 -0400

Ants are considerably older than previously believed, having originated 140 million to 168 million years ago, according to new Harvard University research published in the journal Science. But these resilient insects, now found in terrestrial ecosystems the world over, apparently only began to diversify about 100 million years ago in concert with the flowering plants, Harvard scientists say.

Led by Corrie S. Moreau and Naomi E. Pierce, the researchers reconstructed the ant family tree using DNA sequencing of six genes from 139 representative ant genera, encompassing 19 of 20 ant subfamilies around the world.

"Ants are a dominant feature of nearly all terrestrial ecosystems, and yet we know surprisingly little about their evolutionary history: the major groupings of ants, how they are related to each other, and when and how they arose," says Moreau, a graduate student in Harvard's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. "This work provides a clear picture of how this extraordinarily dominant - in ecological terms - and successful - in evolutionary terms - group of insects originated and diversified."

Moreau, Pierce, and colleagues used a "molecular clock" calibrated with 43 fossils distributed throughout the ant family tree to date key events in the evolution of ants, providing a well- supported estimate for the age of modern lineages. Their conclusion that modern-day ants arose 140 million to 168 million years ago pushes back the origin of ants at least 40 million years earlier than had previously been believed based on estimates from the fossil record.

Dominican insects, digitized

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:25:41 -0400

It's the brilliant colors and otherworldly shapes of the Dominican insects that catch the eye and draw a viewer in. It's the alien forms magnified for all to see clearly that keeps one standing before the images hung at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, studying them. The digital images are one-third of the center's show "Tre: Dominican Contemporaneity," which is the result of a collaboration by three Dominican artists, sociologist Soraya Arecena, and Harvard entomologist Brian D. Farrell, professor of biology and curator of entomology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ).

Farrell's images are just the tip of a digital iceberg, a growing catalog of the Dominican Republic's insect life that Dominican and Harvard students have been compiling for four years and that stands now at 40,000 images representing 6,000 species.

"This is the front end of a growing encyclopedia of life of the Dominican Republic," said Farrell on a walk-through of the gallery.

Farrell's project to catalog Dominican biodiversity began with a student field trip in his insect biology course in 2002. Students on that excursion fogged trees and collected the insects that fell onto cloth sheets slung below. The students helped identify 500 insects, including many new species, which were then digitally scanned and entered into a database.

Since then, Farrell has enlisted a growing corps of both U.S. and Dominican scientists and students from museums and universities in both countries.

The students, directed by the scientists, continue to collect, catalog, and scan insects. They occasionally make significant finds, such as the discovery last year of a citrus tree pest previously unknown in the Dominican Republic and responsible for millions of dollars of losses elsewhere.

Dominican insects make natural art

50443248 — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:08:52 -0400

The digital images are one-third of the center's show "Tre: Dominican Contemporaneity," which is the result of a collaboration by three Dominican artists, sociologist Soraya Arecena, and Harvard entomologist Brian D. Farrell, professor of biology and curator of entomology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ).

How ant (and human) societies might grow

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:22:31 -0400

Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus Edward O. Wilson remains fascinated with the highly organized societies of ants, bees, wasps, termites, and humans. He and Bert Holldobler, with whom he shared a Pulitzer Prize for their book "The Ants," have published a paper about how such societies originate, which appears in the Sept. 20, 2005 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The original colonies of humans, like those of ants and termites, they propose, could have arisen in much the same way.

Both ants and humans have achieved "spectacular ecological success," they write. For humans, this includes winning out over competing forms of humanlike creatures who evolved from apelike ancestors.

Beetle mania

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:25:38 -0400

Grain weevils alone cost the global economy about $35 billion, or a third of the world's grain crop, every year. Various other beetle species damage dozens of crops including bamboo, palm trees, bananas, grasses, sugarcane, pines, and irises. "My research is about the evolution of interactions of various sorts," Professor Brian D. Farrell says, "including those with plants, those with fungi that help insects attack plants, and those with bacteria that help insects digest plants." His main focus of late has been on bark beetles, which cause about $7 billion of timber damage in the United States alone. "We spend tens of millions of dollars every year studying all aspects of their biology," he says.

Daddy longlegs have a global reach

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:23:52 -0400

Huge numbers of arachnid and insect species remain unknown. Arachnologists like Gonzalo Giribet, toiling in relative obscurity, routinely identify new species - and their work is far from over. Giribet, assistant professor of biology and assistant curator of invertebrates in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, has about 50 new species of daddy longlegs in his lab, some described, some in the process of being described. In particular, Giribet is an expert on daddy longlegs in the Cyphophthalmi suborder. These don't closely resemble the daddy longlegs familiar to people living in New England. Though they're in the same order, with the common name daddy longlegs, the familiar New England version is in a different suborder.

Harvard students build Dominican insect database

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:20:17 -0400

Over spring break, a group of Harvard students led by biology Professor Brian Farrell collected specimens representing 500 insect species, including perhaps 200 new ones, and helped establish an insect database for the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Santo Domingo. The trip was a collaboration between several organizations and many individuals, Farrell said. His Dominican colleagues helped teach the students about the local insect life, and the students and the staff of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, in turn, explained and helped set up digital databases that can be used for the Museo's entire 55,000-specimen collection and that can expanded to accommodate future collections.

Fireflies seen in a new light

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:13:00 -0400

Anyone who has ever seen fireflies do their luminescent mating dance on a summer's night has wondered: How do they light up like that? Now, two researchers, Sara Lewis from Tufts University and Thomas Michel from Harvard Medical School, have unraveled the mystery. Fireflies produce their light with nitric oxide, which is the same gas that regulates blood pressure in humans. The effect of Viagra in humans is also due to nitric oxide. Lewis and Michel, who are married to each other, have been discussing their individual research interests since they met each other as undergraduates at Harvard. Their research overlapped when they realized that they were both working on biological processes involving nitric oxide.