Radiation from Japan's leaking Fukushima nuclear plant has caused mutations in some butterflies and damaged the local environment, though humans seem relatively unaffected, researchers say.

There's lots of buzz about the disappearance of honeybees, but the bumblebee is faring even worse – and some say it is the more crucial pollinator.

Locusts exhibit two interconvertible behavioral phases, solitarious and gregarious. While solitarious individuals are repelled from other locusts, gregarious insects are attracted to conspecifics and can form large aggregations such as marching hopper bands. Numerous biological experiments at the individual level have shown how crowding biases conversion towards the gregarious form.

This paper addresses the mass supply and use of butterflies for live exhibits, discusses the risks to biodiversity which this creates, and the educational opportunities it presents. Over the past 30 years a new type of insect zoo has become popular worldwide: the butterfly house. This has given rise to the global Butterfly House Industry (BHI) based on the mass production of butterfly pupae as a cash crop. Production is largely carried out by privately-owned butterfly farms in tropical countries, notably Central America and Southeast Asia.

Sericulture, a combination of agriculture, forestry and industry, is both an art and science of rearing silkworms for silk production. Sericultural practices constitute an important livelihood support system for 66 lakh families in rural India.

Jorhat, May 22: A team of experts from Dibrugarh University and Assam Medical College will visit Sadiya sub-division of Tinsukia district on Thursday, to find out the truth about reports of two dea

In the US, the cultivated area (hectares) and production (tonnes) of crops that require or benefit from insect pollination (directly dependent crops: apples, almonds, blueberries, cucurbits, etc.) increased from 1992, the first year in this study, through 1999 and continued near those levels through 2009; aggregate yield (tonnes/hectare) remained unchanged.

Global warming will lead to earlier beginnings and prolongation of growing seasons in temperate regions and will have pronounced effects on phenology and life-history adaptation in many species. These changes were not easy to simulate for actual phenologies because of the rudimentary temporal (season) and spatial (regional) resolution of climate model projections.

Azadirachta indica A. Juss. (Meliaceae), popularly known as neem, is a wellrecognized tree. Despite its insecticidal properties, neem in the Indian subcontinent is known to be infested by insect pests. In November 2009, mature neem trees in the village of Bhauli, Bakshi ka Talab, Lucknow, started defoliating and soon consumed the entire leaves. This attracted the attention of researchers, as it had hitherto not been observed. Observations revealed a lepidopteran to be the cause of this.

Biodiversity is a commonly used word to describe the variety of life on earth. It refers to the wide range of living organisms: microbes, plants, animals and their habitats. Biodiversity on organic farms accounts for efficient nutrient recycling and effective insect management. An organic farm is a balanced system where the problem of insects is well taken care of by their natural
predators. Therefore, most farms rich in biodiversity possess greater resilience and are able to recover more readily from stress such
as drought, pests, diseases, epidemics, etc.

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