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"Insect pests."
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Wicked bugs : the louse that conquered Napoleon's army & other diabolical insects
In this darkly comical look at the sinister side of our relationship with the natural world, Stewart has tracked down over one hundred of our worst entomological foes-creatures that infest, infect, and generally wreak havoc on human affairs.
Book
DDT and the American century : global health, environmental politics, and the pesticide that changed the world
Praised for its ability to kill insects effectively and cheaply and reviled as an ecological hazard, DDT continues to engender passion across the political spectrum as one of the world's most controversial chemical pesticides. In DDT and the American Century, David Kinkela chronicles the use of DDT around the world from 1941 to the present with a particular focus on the United States, which has played a critical role in encouraging the global use of the pesticide. Kinkela's study offers a unique approach to understanding both this contentious chemical and modern environmentalism in an international context.
eBook
Wicked bugs : the meanest, deadliest, grossest bugs on earth
A \"middle-grade adaptation of Amy Stewart's Wicked Bugs that features profiles of the world's scariest, deadliest, and grossest bugs, from the most painful hornet to flies that transmit deadly diseases to millipedes that stop traffic, to 'bookworms' that devour libraries\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Ecologically controlling insect and mite pests of tea plants with microbial pesticides: a review
Insect and mite pests are damaging stressors that are threatening the cultivation of tea plants, which result in enormous crop loss. Over the years, the effectiveness of synthetic pesticides has allowed for its prominent application as a control strategy. However, the adverse effects of synthetic pesticides in terms of pesticide residue, environmental contamination and insect pest resistance have necessitated the need for alternative strategies. Meanwhile, microbial pesticides have been applied to tackle the damaging activities of the insect and mite pests of tea plants, and their performances were scientifically adjudged appreciable and environmental friendly. Herein, entomopathogenic microbes that were effective against tea geometrid (Ectropis obliqua Prout), tea green leafhopper (Empoasca onukii Matsuda), paraguay tea ampul (Gyropsylla spegazziniana), tea mosquito bug (Helopeltis theivora Waterhouse) and red spider mite (Oligonychus coffea Nietner) have been reviewed. The current findings revealed that microbial pesticides were effective and showed promising performances against these pests. Overall, this review has provided the basic and integrative information on the integrated pest management (IPM) tool(s) that can be utilized towards successful control of the aforementioned insect and mite pests.Graphic abstract
Journal Article
Carpenter ants
These tiny creatures mean big trouble if they choose a person's house or another structure as a perfect place to make their home. Readers are invited into a carpenter ant colony to learn how each ant has a job to do. They'll learn what people do to keep these insects away as well as the role they play in their native environments.
Book
Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) and Its Applications
Although most insect species have a beneficial role in the ecosystems, some of them represent major plant pests and disease vectors for livestock and humans. During the last six–seven decades, the sterile insect technique (SIT) has been used as part of area-wide integrated pest management strategies to suppress, contain, locally eradicate or prevent the (re)invasion of insect pest populations and disease vectors worldwide. This Special Issue on “Sterile insect technique (SIT) and its applications”, which consists of 27 manuscripts (7 reviews and 20 original research articles), provides an update on the research and development efforts in this area. The manuscripts report on all the different components of the SIT package including mass-rearing, development of genetic sexing strains, irradiation, quality control as well as field trials.
Journal Article
Termites
Termites don't just chew through wood; they eat it. That means a home, a tree house, or a tree can be a gigantic snack for a colony of termites. Unfortunately, when a colony decides a building is a perfect place to live, it can be hard to kick out these unwanted guests.
Book
Genomic content of chemosensory genes correlates with host range in wood-boring beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae, Agrilus planipennis, and Anoplophora glabripennis)
Background
Olfaction and gustation underlie behaviors that are crucial for insect fitness, such as host and mate selection. The detection of semiochemicals is mediated via proteins from large and rapidly evolving chemosensory gene families; however, the links between a species’ ecology and the diversification of these genes remain poorly understood. Hence, we annotated the chemosensory genes from genomes of select wood-boring coleopterans, and compared the gene repertoires from stenophagous species with those from polyphagous species.
Results
We annotated 86 odorant receptors (ORs), 60 gustatory receptors (GRs), 57 ionotropic receptors (IRs), 4 sensory neuron membrane proteins (SNMPs), 36 odorant binding proteins (OBPs), and 11 chemosensory proteins (CSPs) in the mountain pine beetle (
Dendroctonus ponderosae
), and 47 ORs, 30 GRs, 31 IRs, 4 SNMPs, 12 OBPs, and 14 CSPs in the emerald ash borer (
Agrilus planipennis
). Four SNMPs and 17 CSPs were annotated in the polyphagous wood-borer
Anoplophora glabripennis.
The gene repertoires in the stenophagous
D. ponderosae
and
A. planipennis
are reduced compared with those in the polyphagous
A. glabripennis
and
T. castaneum
, which is largely manifested through small gene lineage expansions and entire lineage losses. Alternative splicing of GR genes was limited in
D. ponderosae
and apparently absent in
A. planipennis
, which also seems to have lost one carbon dioxide receptor (GR1).
A. planipennis
has two SNMPs, which are related to SNMP3 in
T. castaneum. D. ponderosae
has two alternatively spliced OBP genes, a novel OBP “tetramer”, and as many as eleven IR75 members
.
Simple orthology was generally rare in beetles; however, we found one clade with orthologues of putative bitter-taste GRs (named the “GR215 clade”), and conservation of IR60a from
Drosophila melanogaster.
Conclusions
Our genome annotations represent important quantitative and qualitative improvements of the original datasets derived from transcriptomes of
D. ponderosae
and
A. planipennis
, facilitating evolutionary analysis of chemosensory genes in the Coleoptera where only a few genomes were previously annotated. Our analysis suggests a correlation between chemosensory gene content and host specificity in beetles. Future studies should include additional species to consolidate this correlation, and functionally characterize identified proteins as an important step towards improved control of these pests.
Journal Article
Insects & mites injurious to crops in Middle Eastern countries
This second edition provides updated information on the comprehensive morphology, distribution, and biology of significant pest species of the orders Acarina, Thysanoptera, Orthopetera, Hemiptera, Homoptera, Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera, and Diptera, respectively. Further emphasis is given to their monitoring methods, biological control, and cultural practices. Special attention to the subject of economic entomology makes this book indispensable for field entomologists. With the addition of 15 color plates, this is a convenient handbook for the identification and managemnt of more than 300 pests. It is an essential reference and a useful teaching tool, benefiting students of Middle Eastern agriculture and entomology.
Book
Crop insect pest detection based on dilated multi-scale attention U-Net
Background
Crop pests seriously affect the yield and quality of crops. Accurately and rapidly detecting and segmenting insect pests in crop leaves is a premise for effectively controlling insect pests.
Methods
Aiming at the detection problem of irregular multi-scale insect pests in the field, a dilated multi-scale attention U-Net (DMSAU-Net) model is constructed for crop insect pest detection. In its encoder, dilated Inception is designed to replace the convolution layer in U-Net to extract the multi-scale features of insect pest images. An attention module is added to its decoder to focus on the edge of the insect pest image.
Results
The experiments on the crop insect pest image IP102 dataset are implemented, and achieved the detection accuracy of 92.16% and IoU of 91.2%, which is 3.3% and 1.5% higher than that of MSR-RCNN, respectively.
Conclusion
The results indicate that the proposed method is effective as a new insect pest detection method. The dilated Inception can improve the accuracy of the model, and the attention module can reduce the noise generated by upsampling and accelerate model convergence. It can be concluded that the proposed method can be applied to practical crop insect pest monitoring system.
Journal Article