Locusts offer a powerful model for studying social plasticity and collective behavior. Adapted to extreme environmental fluctuations and population density shifts, they can rapidly transition from a solitary, sedentary phase to the notorious swarm-forming gregarious one. Despite their significance as a model system and the severe humanitarian impact of locust swarms, the mechanisms underlying...
Specialist herbivores, rely on specific cues to identify their host plants; however, these innate stimuli are often difficult to detect from a distance and herbivores might learn to associate additional olfactory or visual information with these cues. For many butterflies, oviposition occurs only when specific gustatory cues are detected by the tarsi, allowing a mated female to identify ideal...
Mosquito-borne diseases pose a major global health burden. Effective vector control depends on understanding how mosquitoes interact with their environment, making behavioral research essential. Object detection models can be trained to distinguish mosquitoes from complex backgrounds, offering high-throughput solutions for behavioral tracking. Here, we present YOLito (YOLO-Mosquito), an...
The Bogong moth Agrotis infusa is a long-distance nocturnal migrant whose navigational ability still remains only partly understood. They travel up to a thousand kilometres to the Australian Alps where they seek out the shelter of isolated cool alpine caves, thereby escaping the approaching summer heat of their breeding grounds. Once in the caves, they enter a state of dormancy over the coming...
The Tunisian desert ant Cataglyphis fortis inhabits the hostile salt pans where it forages for dead arthropods. Some years ago we found that homing foragers locate their nest entrance by following a plume of carbon dioxide emanating from the nest entrance (Buehlmann et al. Current Biology 2012). Since this plume is not nest specific and ants are inevitably killed when they enter an alien nest,...
Anthropophilic mosquito species depend on plant-derived sugars for building energy reserves for flight and survival, as well as reproduction, and is thus an established fact. There are, however, still a large number of open questions to be addressed, such as the natural range of host plant species and how this is affected or affects tritrophic interactions with pathogens, such as the malaria...
Odorant receptors (ORs) are key components of the insect olfactory system and are primarily expressed in antennae, where they mediate the detection of environmental volatiles. Interestingly, certain ORs have also been identified in non-antennal tissues like the ovipositor, suggesting possible roles in regulating oviposition behavior. In this study, we performed transcriptomic analyses across...
