New comprehensive survey catalogues 21 ant species across seven South China Sea islands, revealing human activity as primary driver for exotic ant establishment amid climate-vulnerable coral island ecosystems.

Insect ‘detectives’ have discovered two new types of large stick insects, showing scientists are still uncovering new species in some of Australia’s most well-studied landscapes.

Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station researchers generated the first chromosome-scale reference genome for the rice stink bug, Oebalus pugnax, identifying more than 13,000 genes with broad biological and agricultural relevance. The development created a foundational resource to help scientists better understand how the insect feeds, adapts to host plants and potentially develops resistance to insecticides. The study was published in the Journal of Heredity and provides the most detailed genomic analysis to date of the rice stink bug, which feeds on more than 15 host plant species, including grain sorghum, and has shown resistance to pyrethroid insecticides in some populations.

A research team at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology discovered a previously unknown strategy by which certain fungi neutralize spruce defense compounds. These fungi are introduced into trees by bark beetles, and their success makes it easier for bark beetles to invade the trees. The researchers showed that many of these introduced fungi can metabolize the trees’ chemical defenses and spread through the bark rapidly. Two of them can further deactivate the initial degradation products by binding the sugar molecule ribose to them. These transformed defense compounds are harmless and stable, and they cannot be converted back into the original, more toxic substances by cleaving off the ribose. The fungus that was most effective at neutralizing spruce defense compounds by binding ribose thrived particularly well in spruce bark. These findings could lead to new methods of combating bark beetle infestations in European forests, such as selectively altering the microbial communities within the trees.

Scientists have found how a protein produced by bacteria disrupts the mechanism that controls flower development in plants, turning reproductive organs into leaf-like structures. These findings shed light on a plant disease that is expected to spread as climate change expands the range of its insect vectors in northern latitudes. They used synchrotron technique at the ESRF, the European Synchrotron in Grenoble, France. The results are the Editor’s Pick in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

When public health researchers want to know whether diseases such as COVID-19 or polio are circulating in a community, they can look for genetic evidence in wastewater.

Entomologist Dana Price wondered whether the same principle could be applied to mosquitoes. The question led to an unconventional experiment.

“What we did, colloquially, was build a mosquito toilet,” said Price, an associate professor at the Center for Vector Biology, Department of Entomology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and a lead author of a study published in Microbiology Spectrum.