Agricultural Experimentation: Design and Analysis

Pollen Morphology and Plant Taxonomy: Angiosperms

Liquid crystals play an important role in biology because the combination of order and mobility is a basic requirement for self-organisation and structure formation in living systems. Cholesteric liquid crystals are omnipresent in living matter under both in vivo and in vitro conditions and address the major types of molecules essential to life. In the animal and plant kingdoms, the cholesteric structure is a recurring design, suggesting a convergent evolution to an optimised left-handed helix. Herein, we review the recent advances in the cholesteric organisation of DNA, chromatin, chitin, cellulose, collagen, viruses, silk and cholesterol ester deposition in atherosclerosis. Cholesteric structures can be found in bacteriophages, archaea, eukaryotes, bacterial nucleoids, chromosomes of unicellular algae, sperm nuclei of many vertebrates, cuticles of crustaceans and insects, bone, tendon, cornea, fish scales and scutes, cuttlebone and squid pens, plant cell walls, virus suspensions, silk produced by spiders and silkworms, and arterial wall lesions. This article specifically aims at describing the consequences of the cholesteric geometry in living matter, which are far from being fully defined and understood, and discusses various perspectives. The roles and functions of biological cholesteric liquid crystals include maximisation of packing efficiency, morphogenesis, mechanical stability, optical information, radiation protection and evolution pressure.

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Cholesteric liquid crystals in living matter

The New Integrated Pest Management Paradigm for the Modern Age

This manual is an excellent blending of scientific techniques and knowledge with criminal investigation backgrounds. It works at maintaining the skills and precision needed by the entomologist to translate rather gruesome scenes into worthwhile courtroom information, plus tweaking one's conscience with ethical and objective standards.

A Review of Entomology and Death: A Procedural Guide

/pdf/whatever-happened-to-ipm-3l125qjz07.pdf

Whatever Happened to IPM

The relationship between insect development and temperature has been well established and has a wide range of uses, including the use of blow flies for postmortem (PMI) interval estimations in death investigations. To use insects in estimating PMI, we must be able to determine the insect age at the time of discovery and backtrack to time of oviposition. Unfortunately, existing development models of forensically important insects are only linear approximations and do not take into account the curvilinear properties experienced at extreme temperatures. A series of experiments were conducted with Lucilia sericata, a forensically important blow fly species, that met the requirements needed to create statistically valid development models. Experiments were conducted over 11 temperatures (7.5 to 32.5 °C, at 2.5 °C) with a 16:8 L:D cycle. Experimental units contained 20 eggs, 10 g beef liver, and 2.5 cm of pine shavings. Each life stage (egg to adult) had five sampling times. Each sampling time was replicated four times, for a total of 20 measurements per life stage. For each sampling time, the cups were pulled from the chambers and the stage of each maggot was documented morphologically through posterior spiracle slits and cephalopharyngeal skeletal development. Data were normally distributed with the later larval stages (L3f, L3m) having the most variation within and transitioning between stages. The biological minimum was between 7.5 °C and 10 °C, with little egg development and no egg emergence at 7.5 °C. Temperature-induced mortality was highest from 10.0 to 17.5 °C and 32.5 °C. The development data generated illustrates the advantages of large datasets in modeling Lucilia sericata development and the need for curvilinear models in describing development at environmental temperatures near the biological minima and maxima.

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Development modeling of Lucilia sericata (Diptera: Calliphoridae).

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1074&context=natresreinhard

Curatorial implications of Ophyra capensis (Order Diptera, Family Muscidae) puparia recovered from the body of the Blessed Antonio Patrizi, Monticiano, Italy (Middle Ages).

How behavioral patterns are related to niche partitioning is an important question in understanding how closely related species within ecological communities function. Behavioral niche partitioning associated with thermoregulation is well documented in tiger beetles as a group. Co-occurring species of salt flat tiger beetles have adapted many thermoregulatory behaviors to cope with this harsh ecosystem. On first examination these beetles appear to occur in overlapping microhabitats and therefore compete for resources. To determine if behavioral niche partitioning is allowing multiple species to occur within the same harsh salt flat ecosystem we observed Cicindela nevadica lincolniana, Cicindela circumpicta, Cicindela fulgida, and Cicindela togata between 8:00 h and 21:00 h and recorded all behaviors related to thermoregulation using a digital voice recorder. Results of this study strongly indicate that competition among these species for resources has been reduced by the adaptation of different thermoregulatory behaviors such as spending time in shallow water, avoiding the sun during the hottest parts of the day, and by positioning their body against or away from the soil. The endangered C. n. lincolniana appears to rely most heavily on the shallow water of seeps for their diurnal foraging behavior (potentially limiting their foraging habitat), but with the advantage of allowing foraging during the hottest times of the day when potential competitors are less frequent. Ironically, this association also may help explain C. n. lincolniana's susceptibility to extinction: beyond the loss of saline wetlands generally, limited seeps and pools even within remaining saline habitat may represent a further habitat limitation within an already limited habitat.

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Behavioral niche partitioning in a sympatric tiger beetle assemblage and implications for the endangered Salt Creek tiger beetle

The purpose of the study was to determine whether undergraduate students receiving web-based instruction based on traditional, key character, or classification instruction differed in their performance of insect identification tasks. All groups showed a significant improvement in insect identifications on pre- and post-two-dimensional picture specimen quizzes. The study also determined student performance on insect identification tasks was not as good as for family-level identification as compared to broader insect orders and arthropod classification identification tasks. Finally, students erred significantly more by misidentification than misspelling specimen names on prepared specimen quizzes. Results of this study support that short web-based insect identification exercises can improve insect identification performance. Also included is a discussion of how these results can be used in teaching and future research on biological identification.

/pdf/using-web-based-key-character-and-classification-instruction-39subluytu.pdf

Leon G. Higley

Papers

Whatever Happened to IPM

Development modeling of Lucilia sericata (Diptera: Calliphoridae).

Curatorial implications of Ophyra capensis (Order Diptera, Family Muscidae) puparia recovered from the body of the Blessed Antonio Patrizi, Monticiano, Italy (Middle Ages).

Behavioral niche partitioning in a sympatric tiger beetle assemblage and implications for the endangered Salt Creek tiger beetle

Using Web-Based Key Character and Classification Instruction for Teaching Undergraduate Students Insect Identification