A handful of new studies moves the needle toward a consensus on the long-disputed question of whether insect wings evolved from legs or from the body wall, but the devil is in the details.
The glossy shell of some beetles, it has long been speculated, helps hide the insects from predators. A recent paper put the hypothesis to the test—and found it wanting.
The finding that a bacterium within a bacterium within an animal cell cooperates with the host on a biosynthetic pathway suggests the endosymbiont is, practically speaking, an organelle.
Over the past seven years, Xiao-Long Lin has characterized nearly 70 new species of nonbiting midges and developed DNA barcodes to aid in future ecological surveys.
In chapter 5, “Resurgence: Bedbugs Bite Back,” author Emily Monosson chronicles the rise of the pesky pests in the face of humanity’s best chemical efforts.
Extending her initial studies of social wasps, Mary Jane West-Eberhard has spent her career probing the evolutionary relationship between social behavior and developmental flexibility.
Shortly after a rat infested supply ship ran around in Lord Howe Island off the east coast of Australia in 1918, the newly introduced mammals wiped out the island's phasmids—stick insects the size of a human hand.
Researchers rediscover a giant insect, thought to have gone extinct a century ago, and plan to reintroduce it to its native island off the coast of Australia.