Newswise — The first day of spring is Wednesday, March 21 and Mother Nature is kicking things into high gear. Soon, pollinating insects will be cruising for nectar and mother ticks will lay roughly 3,000 eggs apiece in the leaf litter of Northeastern forests. Scientists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst are available to discuss the evolution and behavior of some of nature's star pollinators and parasites.
Ticks: Condos for Bacteria?
Ticks are known for spreading Lyme disease, mosquitoes bring malaria. But these bugs aren't bad in and of themselves, they just loan their bodies as a guest house for awhile until the disease-causing organism moves on to its next host. When, evolutionarily speaking, do such pathogens strike up these living arrangements with their hosts? Do particular genetic mutations make some partnerships more likely than others? And how stable are these partnerships—long-lasting through evolutionary time or merely summer romances? These are the questions that keep geneticist Stephen Rich up at night. His work focuses on the interactions among pathogens, vectors and hosts in the evolution of malaria, Lyme disease, and the Rabies virus. Understanding the evolution of these interactions should shed light on how the diseases and their hosts may shift in the future, which will help scientists devise better tools for fighting the pathogens themselves.
Plants and Insects: Robbers and Juvenile Delinquents
A bee alighting on a flower may look like a peaceful rite of spring—but to the trained eye the world of plant-insect interactions is often violent—rife with thievery and guile. Plants that make nectar to reward pollinators must also contend with nectar robbers—visitors who don't pollinate anything but just go for the booty, often damaging flowers in the act. Some pollinators are welcome as adults, but dangerous in their youth —as with the hawk moth, Manduca sexta. Plants such as jimson weed entice the adult moth with nectar and showy petals, but the cost is more Manduca babies, also known as tobacco hornworm—caterpillars that devour the plant's leaves. Lynn Adler has been researching the trade-offs that exist in many plant-insect interactions and their influence on plant evolution. Her work, which includes a number of squash experiments, has implications for treating pests of crop plants.
RSS