The long-held belief that plant-eating insects in tropical forests are picky eaters that stay “close to home” – dining only on locale-specific vegetation – is being challenged by new research findings that suggest these insects feast on a broader menu of foliage and can be consistently found across hundreds of miles of tropical forestland.

Rainforests are the world’s treasure houses of biodiversity, but all rainforests are not the same. Biodiversity may be more evenly distributed in some forests than in others and, therefore, may require different management and preservation strategies. That is one of the conclusions of a large-scale Smithsonian study of a lowland rainforest in New Guinea, published in the Aug. 9 issue of the journal Nature.

Aging flies are simply crawling with bacteria—both inside and out—but their microbial infestations don’t seem to hasten the insects toward death, according to a new study in the August issue of the journal Cell Metabolism, a publication of Cell Press. The findings suggest that the energy the flies expend to fight their burgeoning bugs comes without a longevity trade-off, the researchers said.

Aerodynamic scaling rules that explain how flight varies according to weight and wing loading have been used to compare general speeds of a wide range of flyers, from the smallest insects to the largest aircraft.

Mosquitoes walk on water better than water striders, cling to smooth ceilings and walls as tightly as geckos, and clutch the skin of their victims with annoying tenacity in search of blood.

Unlike moths and butterflies that are often brilliantly colored to warn potential predators that they carry toxins, flowers and the fruits they produce have brilliant colors and unusual shapes because they want to attract the attention of pollinators and frugivores who will disperse their pollen and seed, thus guaranteeing the next generation.

In research to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Plant Biologists in Chicago (July 7-11, 2007), scientists will show that elevated CO2 may negatively impact the relationship between some plants and insects. Elevated CO2 is considered to be a serious catalyst of global change.

Researchers observed the behaviour of Great-tits foraging for artificial prey to understand more clearly how a species evolves to protect themselves from predators.

Insects make up more than half of the known animal species on our planet and they can be found in all kinds of habitat and feed on all kinds of nutrients. They can even be used in evidence in court cases. So we are talking about forensic entomology.

Weeds are winning the battle when it comes to surviving in the wild with foliage eating insects preferring the taste of native plants, according to a study by Queensland University of Technology.

The coming summer vibrates with expressions of insect love and desire. The cicada's songs or the butterflies' bright colours are examples of how an emitting sex attracts conspecific members of the responding sex.

Undergraduate education generally involves acquiring "received knowledge" - in other words, absorbing the past discoveries of scholars and scientists. But University of North Carolina at Charlotte senior biology major Andrew Pierce went beyond the textbooks and uncovered something previously unknown.