The 'easyJet ecoJet' would emit 50 percent less CO2 than today's newest ...
Thursday September 18, 2008
More Images...
![]()
September 17, 2008
Studying Rodents Without Killing Them...![]()
September 15, 2008
Corals Respond to Day and Night...
The large number of species of wasp that lays its eggs under the skin of unwitting caterpillars is even more diverse than previously thought according to researchers.
The wasps were reared from caterpillars collected in Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), a biological reserve in northwestern Costa Rica.
By combining ecological and genetic data using a technique called DNA barcoding with the painstaking detective work of taxonomy, the researchers have dramatically increased – nearly doubling – the estimated number of species of parasitoid wasps. "This represents microgastrine wasps reared from approximately 3,500 caterpillar species in ACG," said Josephine Rodriguez, a doctoral student and microgastrine expert. "Since there are an estimated 10,000 species of caterpillars there, including many unsampled ones that mine inside leaves or live in fungi, this is just the tip of the microgastrine iceberg."
The wasps are extraordinarily specific to the caterpillar hosts they attack. More than 90 percent of the wasp species were found to target only one or a very few species of caterpillar, out of more than 3,500 caterpillar species sampled in ACG.
"One of the messages of this paper is that you really need all of these different kinds of data in order to tell the species apart – that just using the morphology alone, or the genetic data or the ecological information alone isn’t enough," said University of Illinois entomology professor James Whitfield, who led the taxonomic study. "However, once the species are distinguished, anyone can use the DNA barcode to rapidly and accurately identify one of them."
"The family Braconidae, to which the microgastrines belong, has about 15,000 described species in the world, and it’s been estimated to have 50 to 60,000 species, about the same as all vertebrates – all fish, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds – which is a lot!" Whitfield said. "And what we’re saying is that if anything we’re underestimating how many more there are."
-- Justin Jernigan
Most Popular
- Recommended
- Commented
From the Blogs

- LiveScience Blogs
-
- Religious Women Have 20 Percent Lower Mortality Rate - Study
- Determining Physiological Age - Biomarker Discovery May Be The Key
- V458 Vulpeculae - A Binary Star Explosion Inside A Nebula
- First Genome Wide Sequence Of Extinct Animal - The Woolly Mammoth
- Banning Fast Food Advertising Would Curb Childhood Obesity But The Social Cost Would Be High
- Global Warming Projections Overestimated, Says Black Carbon Study
- King Herod's Grave At Herodium Confirmed?
- Religious Women Have 20 Percent Lower Mortality Rate - Study
- 11.5.2008 | Leonard David
Spaceport America Measure Defeated
Residents of Otero County in New Mexico have defeated a Spaceport America tax increase to help build the inland spaceport. Reports from the field... ... - 10.30.2008 | Leonard David
Private Moon Lander Group Teams with NASA
Keep an eye out for Odyssey Moon Ventures — one of the contenders in the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize competition — to announce they... ...
- 11.5.2008 | Leonard David






