A University of Missouri entomologist, Robert Sites, discovered two previously unknown saucer bug species, Ctenipocoris sagittatus from Guyana and Venezuela and Ctenipocoris reticulatus from India, expanding scientific knowledge of global biodiversity. The findings highlight both the complexity of identifying these tiny aquatic insects and the vast amount of life that remains undiscovered in freshwater ecosystems around the world.

An efficient few-shot framework was developed for large-scale annotation of light-trapped insect images. MLTIDD integrated Grounding DINO, SAM, and SAHI for multi-scale insect detection, while InsectSSRL exploited massive unlabeled insect images to enhance few-shot classification. MLTIDD achieved 79.6% AP50–95 and 90.8% AR, while InsectSSRL achieved 80.35% classification accuracy using only 5% labeled data. The framework reduced expert annotation time by approximately 80%, enabling efficient large-scale dataset construction.

She’s a Grammy Award-winning international superstar, and now, Taylor Swift is also a genus of plant-feeding insects from Australia that were previously unknown to science.

A KAUST-led study published in Nature reveals that aquatic invertebrates — oysters, mussels, crabs, and other shellfish — are far more nutritionally valuable than previously recognized. Analyzing 30 essential nutrients across more than 50,000 species, researchers found current global invertebrate production supplies enough vitamin B12 and selenium to meet the annual needs of over 5 billion people, and enough iodine, zinc, copper, and omega-3s for over 1 billion. The findings argue for putting nutrition — not just production volume — at the center of fisheries, aquaculture, and food-system policy.

Satellite measurements detected declining photosynthetic activity in Western U.S. forests two years before bark-beetle mortality appeared in aerial detection surveys, according to new University of Utah-led research. The first-of-its-kind study suggests that satellite-observed chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF), a measure of plant photosynthesis, could provide an early warning of forest stress. As drought, wildfire and insect outbreaks occur with increasing frequency across the American West, the technology could also help scientists understand how these disturbances affect forests’ ability to absorb and store carbon from the atmosphere.

Researchers at the University of Iowa have determined that periodical cicadas, insect swarms that emerge from the ground every 13 or 17 years, may go extinct. The primary reasons are the removal of old forests, upon which the cicadas depend for food, and that cicadas disperse only very short distances when they emerge. Results appear in the journal Ecology.

Everything you eat passes one checkpoint before it enters your body: taste. In a fraction of a second, it decides what gets swallowed and what gets rejected, a judgment call critical to survival. Now, for the first time, researchers at the Champalimaud Foundation (CF) and their collaborators have mapped the complete neural wiring behind this process in an animal, tracing taste signals from sensory neurons across the body all the way to the motor neurons that drive feeding, and revealing neural pathways that could explain how taste triggers anticipatory insulin release before a single calorie is absorbed.