Aphids have mutualistic viruses!

Aphids can be a pain in the ass to gardeners and farmers. Although they look pretty harmless, they’re to plants what mosquitoes are to people and more. They transmit some pretty serious diseases which cause millions of dollars in damage per year. They’re also famous for their fecundity-they’re parthenogenic and their daughters are actually born [...]

Cheshire’s Top 5 Entomology Videos

I post a lot of videos here on this blog because I find them a very useful and interesting teaching tool. Why explain the life cycle of a parasitoid wasp in two or three boring paragraphs when I can simply hop over to youtube and find a video explaining the same thing narrated by David [...]

Back in a bit…but for now, bugs in the news!

Yeah…sorry I haven’t kept up with the bug-blogging as of late. Had a few things going on in my life…but I dare not turn this into a ‘bitch-about-my-life’ blog. There are far too many of those and quite frankly, my strifes aren’t that interesting. So…let’s go through some of the news that’s been brewing since [...]

Bug Photo of The Week: Tachinid Growth Inside Bombyx Mori

I always write about these cool parasitoids which eat the host from the inside out…but I rarely, if ever show pictures of the process. Let’s change that, shall we? If you’re a regular reader of this weblog, you’ve seen me mention Compsilura concinnata before. It’s this neat little parasitoid fly which, unlike many parasitoids, can [...]

Evolution of Tympanic Hearing Structures in Parasitoid Diptera

Google books is a wonderful thing. You can find pretty much anything on there, at least in part. Quite a bit of the stuff you’ll find is missing some pages, but it’s definitely enough to learn from…or at least find a title of something you’re looking for or interested in. Today’s example: Insect Hearing . [...]

Aphid Wasps From National Geographic

A really cool video about parasitoid wasps from National Geographic. You can see the larva developing on the inside of the aphid and the wasp emerging from it’s mummy.

Sericulture Biocontrol: Trichopria khandalus…fighting parasites with parasites

To fully understand the context of this article, you probably need to read this article over at my old blog about the signficance of tachinid fly pests to silk production. It’s a great peice of work about a parasitoid fly (a tachinid…this blog’s namesake) that’s been devastating the silk industry in India. So…you have a [...]

Last part of the Captian Planet episode

First thing, they owe the poor professor an apology. Why can’t this ever happen in real life?

Compsilura concinnata

Yesterday, I wrote about a fly that’s been killing our native silkmoths. It’s really an unfortunate story, but I didn’t really write anything about the biology of this guy. I’ve been writing about various parasites and going into their biology a little bit, but I don’t think I’ve ever hit on tachinid biology. You can [...]

This is exactly what the internet is supposed to be used for!

I’m doing some research right now on how biocontrol programs have basically destroyed our native moths. Basically, we have a problem with an introduced pest called the ‘gypsy moth’ which I better know as Lymantria dispar. It was introduced way back in the early 1860s and has been nomming up our forests ever since. Infestations [...]