The latest news about entomology, brought to you by the Entomological Society of America
By Edward Ricciuti Males of an African butterfly, with the improbable nickname of “squinting bush brown,” are the Lepidopteran version of chick magnets—if their generation of caterpillars chills out while it grows up. Caterpillars of this butterfly (Bicyclus anynana) that develop during the cool dry season flip traditional sex roles as adults when ready to mate […]
By Richard Levine If you want to do lab research on insects, you need to be able to keep them alive, sometimes for many generations. That means you need to know how and what to feed them, even if it means giving blood to bed bugs. Many moths in the family Noctuidae are subjects of […]
By tracing nearly 3,000 genes to the earliest common ancestor of butterflies and moths, University of Florida scientists have created an extensive “Tree of Lepidoptera” in the first study to use large-scale, next-generation DNA sequencing. The study found that some insects once classified as moths are actually butterflies, increasing butterfly species to a higher number […]
A new species of moth discovered in the Appalachian Mountains has been named after Attakullakulla, a Cherokee chief who lived in the region in the 1700s. The new species, Cherokeea attakullakulla, is described in a special issue of the journal ZooKeys. In 1958 a professor from Cornell University, Dr. John G. Franclemont, was studying some […]
The discovery of a new butterfly species is very rare nowadays, so it’s even more remarkable that Texas researchers have discovered not just one, but two new species. “It was completely unexpected,” said Dr. Nick Grishin, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. “We were studying genetics of these butterflies […]
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