We may be in the middle of an insect mass extinction. The once abundant Rocky Mountain locust was last seen in 1902. Under the Mikheyev Group, Peiyu Yuan used data from a related extant locust species and comparative genomics to identify artifacts in museum data of the Rocky Mountain locust.
Researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) have discovered several new species of butterflies and moths in Northern Australia, identifying a conservation stronghold of national and international significance.
The amazing diversity we see in Australian animal developed early and has slowed considerably in the last 10 million years, say Ian Brennan and Scott Keogh from the ANU Research School of Biology.
By nature of their conspicuousness, sexual signals can cause a conflict between natural and sexual selection, with natural selection favoring a decrease in exaggeration of an ornament and sexual selection favoring an increase.
The Peer Community in (PCI) project offers an alternative to the current system of publication - which is particularly expensive and not very transparent.
The cross-kingdom mimicry of female insect sex pheromones by sexually deceptive orchids has fascinated evolutionary biologists ever since the importance of chemistry in pollination by sexual deception was first recognised.
Any antagonistic interaction has the potential of favouring sex, just as predicted by the "Red Queen hypothesis" in the case of host-parasite interactions. Is it really the case?