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Post Info TOPIC: Insects


L

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RE: Insects
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Tiny 'headless' insect turns out to be rarest ladybug in the United States

A former Montana State University student has discovered the rarest ladybug in the United States, according to MSU entomologist Michael Ivie. Described in the journal Systemic Entomology, the new ladybug was crawling across a sand dune in southwest Montana when it dropped into a trap set by entomology grad student Ross Winton.
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300 million year old bug

This 305-million-year-old juvenile insect is from an unknown genus and species. 

Researchers have constructed three-dimensional (3D) portraits of two 305-million-year-old insect nymphs by scanning their fossils with X-rays. The results, reported today in PLoS ONE, are the most detailed pictures yet of juvenile insects of that period.



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Archaboilus musicus
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Jurassic cricket's song recreated

Night-time in the Jurassic forest was punctuated by the unmistakable sound of chirping bush crickets. This is according to scientists
who have reconstructed the song of a cricket that chirped 165 million years ago.
A remarkably complete fossil of the prehistoric insect enabled the team to see the structures in its wings that rubbed together to make the sound.

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Fossil cricket reveals Jurassic love song

The love song of an extinct cricket that lived 165 million years ago has been brought back to life by scientists at the University of Bristol. The song - possibly the most ancient known musical song documented to date - was reconstructed from microscopic wing features on a fossil discovered in North East China. It allows us to listen to one of the sounds that would have been heard by dinosaurs and other creatures roaming Jurassic forests at night.
Some 165 million years ago, the world was host to a diversity of sounds. Primitive bushcrickets and croaking amphibians were among the first animals to produce loud sounds by stridulation (rubbing certain body parts together). Modern-day bushcrickets - also known as katydids - produce mating calls by rubbing a row of teeth on one wing against a plectrum on the other wing but how their primitive ancestors produced sound and what their songs actually sounded like was unknown - until now.

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World's biggest insect found

An American explorer claims to have found the world's biggest insect on New Zealand's Little Barrier Island.
The insect is called the "Weta Bug" and has a wing span of around 18 cm and weighs "as much as three mice".

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Halictus eurygnathus
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A species of bee which was believed to be extinct in Britain has been found in East Sussex - 65 years after it was last seen.
A study by entomologist Steven Falk shows the solitary bee, Halictus eurygnathus, is at at seven sites on the South Downs.

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Butterfly
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A rare he-she butterfly is born in London's NHM
 
A half-male, half-female butterfly has hatched at London's Natural History Museum.
A line down the insect's middle marks the division between its male side and its more colourful female side.
Failure of the butterfly's sex chromosomes to separate during fertilisation is behind this rare sexual chimera.

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Rare insect fossil reveals 100 million years of evolutionary stasis

Researchers have discovered the 100 million-year-old ancestor of a group of large, carnivorous, cricket-like insects that still live today in southern Asia, northern Indochina and Africa. The new find, in a limestone fossil bed in northeastern Brazil, corrects the mistaken classification of another fossil of this type and reveals that the genus has undergone very little evolutionary change since the Early Cretaceous Period, a time of dinosaurs just before the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana.



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Mengea tertiaria
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3-D reconstruction of the fossilised twisted-wing Mengea tertiaria (Strepsiptera) from approx. 42 million years ago.

Its stay on this planet was actually meant to be a very short one. Male twisted-wing parasites (Strepsiptera) usually have a life span of only few hours. However, accidentally a specimen of Mengea tertiara, about the size of an aphid, became preserved for 'eternity': during its wedding flight about 42 million years ago it was caught in a drop of tree resin and subsequently almost perfectly conserved in a piece of amber.
PD Dr. Hans Pohl of Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany) calls this "a very exceptional stroke of luck." Together with colleagues from Jena, Hamburg and New York, the insect researcher at the Institute of Systematic Zoology and Evolutionary Biology with Phyletic Museum has now 'resurrected' the fossil insect: using high resolution micro-computer tomography (micro-CT) the anatomy of an extinct insect was completely reconstructed three-dimensionally for the first time.

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RE: Insects
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The public are being asked to help track the UK's butterfly populations as conservationists warn many native species are in serious decline.
The online Big Butterfly Count survey aims to get a better understanding of which species are in need of most help.

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