When a rare species is a product. Alive or dead, rare or mundane, insects are weirdly easy to find for sale online. However, in some cases, the insects or spiders sold through the various e-commerce sites, both niche and large-scale, may be of dubious provenance. Some may be bred and reared in sustainable programs. Others […]
Enlarge / Fire ants form a protrusion from an ant raft. (credit: Vernerey Research Group/CU Boulder) Fire ants are a textbook example of collective behavior, capable of behaving as individuals, and also banding together to form floating rafts in response to flooding. Now a pair of mechanical engineers from the University of Colorado, Boulder, have […]
Enlarge / University of California, Riverside scientists suspended fresh pieces of raw chicken from branches to attract carrion-feeding “vulture bees” in Costa Rica. (credit: Quinn McFrederick/UCR) Ask a random person to picture a bee, and they’ll likely conjure up the familiar black-and-yellow striped creature buzzing from flower to flower collecting pollen to bring back to the […]
Wellesley College researchers have identified a sound that Asian honeybees use to warn the hive of a “murder hornet” attack. Asian honeybees (Apis cerana) produce a unique alarm sound to alert hive members to an attack by giant “murder hornets,” according to a new paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. For the […]
Scientists at the University of Arizona set up their own “Bug Fight Club” in the lab, staging wrestling matches between insects to learn more about defensive structures and the evolution of weapons in the animal kingdom. They outlined their findings in two separate papers, one published last fall in the journal Functional Ecology and the […]