Drivers of insect decline: direct, indirect, and combined pressures academic.oup.com/aesa/article...

Biodiversity shapes human health and human well-being...but how do we measure those connections? That´s the challenge I discuss in my contribution for the new Biodiversity and Health FACTS Report from the Veolia Institute. Full report: www.institut.veolia.org/en/publicati...

Biodiversity and Health

2026

institut.veolia.org

🥑 A gall midge species, Bruggmanniella perseae, has been identified as the cause of fruit deformation in avocado crops in Mexico, with six parasitoid species discovered that naturally control this damaging insect pest: doi.org/10.3897/jhr.99.200280

Our paper on the rather large genome (1.08Gb) of the agricultural pest blueberry gall wasp is now out as a preprint. We also looked across chalcidoid genomes and found the genome size variation is largely driven by transposable element proliferation. 🧪 #Ormyridae #Hemadasnubilipennis

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · 4d ago

The chromosome level genome of the Blueberry Stem Gall Wasp, Hemadas nubilipennis (Hymenoptera: Ormyridae) on lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium) reveals repeat-driven expansion https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.21.753281v1

I'm sorry, what now? www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Direct cell-to-cell transmission of retrotransposons

Retrotransposons can infect neighboring cells using a mechanism that relies on a small fusogen-like protein rather than on the envelope protein that is typically required for infection.

cell.com

Happy to share results of the @bat1kgenomes.bsky.social phase 1, providing reference genomes covering 21 bat families. New insights into bat phylogeny, ancestral genome reconstruction, European origin & ancestral echolocation. Great work by a team of 100+ colleagues www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Reference genomes and fossils revise bat family phylogeny and biogeography - Nature

An updated phylogeny of bats is presented, based on new genome assemblies and many ancient fossils and including all known bat families.

nature.com

Exec Summ: Citizen science data often miss species because people tend to record sightings only where public access is easy. To get a complete picture, we need to encourage people to log common species near their homes and at the same time improve access to private natural areas for rare species.

Richard Fox@richardfoxbc.bsky.social · last wk.

📣 New paper alert. Latest study by @mingrui-li.bsky.social as part of his PhD @uniexecec.bsky.social on the impact of public access to land on #CitizenScience butterfly recording. 🥾⛔️📋🦋 @savebutterflies.bsky.social @ukceh.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New research in #RESMedVetEnt Body size and wing shape responses of #mosquitoes (Diptera: #Culicidae) to contrasting environmental conditions in cold-temperate Argentine Patagonia doi.org/10.1111/mve.... @wileyecology.bsky.social

An american kissing bug species was found a year ago in a hotel in Lisbon. Such an introduction would be very troublesome as Spain, and I guess also Portugal, have a relatively high hidden prevalence of Chagas disease. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Live triatomine bug, vector of Trypanosoma cruzi , found engorged in Lisbon hotel room: A first for Portugal and for Europe - Parasites & Vectors

Triatomine bugs are blood feeding insects that transmit the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, causative agent of Chagas disease. The bugs are found primarily in the Americas with a few species in Asia and A...

link.springer.com

Working with #arthropod #bodymass in #ecology? 🕷️🪲🦟🦗🐜🐝🪳🐞 Then this preprint is for you! Batch-measuring of body length, width, and area and calculation of individual level body mass! ⚖️ This is a game changer!🌐 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @wslresearch.bsky.social @uni-wuerzburg.de @ethz.ch

Still doing this personal project of finding, photographing and illustrating the geometer moths of Finland. About 70 of the 300 or so species done. Not likely to ever be completed, but a lot of fun regardless! #SciArt

#Butterfly ranges are shifting on every continent, with #climatechange and #extremeweather associated with 79% of recorded movements. A global study of 1,758 species also reveals major monitoring gaps in biodiversity-rich tropical regions. DOI: doi.org/rh8j

Climate change is reshaping butterfly ranges worldwide • Muser Press

The researchers call for broader and more inclusive monitoring to track how climate pressures and land-use change are affecting butterfly diversity.

muser.press

Are you interested in #gulls, diet metabarcoding, or both? Of course you are! Check out our new preprint where we use molecular methods to decode the (animal-based) diet of lesser black-backed gulls - arguably a species with one of the most diverse diets out there. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

bioRxiv Ecology@biorxiv-ecology.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Evaluating DNA metabarcoding to characterise diet diversity and foraging strategies in a generalist mesopredator, the lesser black-backed gull (Larus fuscus) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.17.738687v1

New #OpenAccess research in #RESInsectConsDiv Systematic differences in #phenology estimates from unstructured and structured #biodiversity datasets doi.org/10.1111/icad.70098 #Lepidoptera #InsectMonitoring @manusaunders.bsky.social @wileyecology.bsky.social Images courtesy of article authors

Midsummer midnight at a wilderness mosquito trap.

Waiting for the sun to make even a tiny appearance to capitalize on the final chance to collect a cloudberry pollinator sample on this Northern Enontekiö ice cored mire. #insectsofthenorth #interregaurora

eDNA methods are opening new possibilities for biodiversity monitoring. But what is still needed for routine use? The recording of our webinar with Tiina Laamanen and Kristian Meissner from SYKE is now available: www.biodiversa.eu/2026/06/14/u...

Webinar: eDNA methods in environmental monitoring

In this webinar, we explore where eDNA methods stand on the road to routine implementation, and what is still needed to support their wider uptake...

biodiversa.eu

Started fieldwork this week. Cloudberry started flowering alreadly, which means scrambling to collect pollinators. Cloudberry herbivore Boloria freija was out and about too. Got many malaise traps up, but not all. Well there's still snow up north. #insectsofthenorth #interregaurora

It's not 1536, but Anne Boleyn has taken over the news. Recently a team of computer scientists, electrical engineers and a historical novelist think they have discovered the “true face” of Anne (& her mother) by applying AI-based computational facial recognition to Holbein sketches. The catch? /1

Sonja Drimmer@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 4mo ago

They’re at it again. None of this is valuable historical research. It’s about exploiting historical artifacts and historians to develop computer vision further and to make a soft cultural argument for surveillance tech. This nonsense has been going on since c2010.

Pterosaurs were colourful? Tapejarids having magenta iridescent colorationation? Chinese team uncovers complex pycnofibres with pigments in Sinopterus dongi. Source: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.06.723168v1.full.pdf+html

Practical use for bloodsucking insects.

Common Tern Project@commonternproject.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Look who arrived as well! 147 little field assistants made their way into one of our incubators. These laboratory-bred kissing bugs will help us collect blood samples from incubating terns. Stored in a fake egg for c. 20 minutes, they collect blood, which we then gratefully collect from them.

Cool, shapes of melanosome sized structures in a well preserved skin fossil of a young Diplodocus suggest light speckles on a dark base colour.

How fungus gnats, and their names, can make science more inclusive. Believe it or not! scientistseessquirre... 🧪🌍🪲🪳

Dark taxa, species naming, and inclusivity in science

I’m a few months behind, but I finally got around to reading 318 pages of species descriptions for new species of Singaporean fungus gnats. It was fascinating – and that’s not sarcasm. Let me expla…

scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com

Add enough environmental noise to a mosquito-borne disease model and epidemics that R0 says should happen simply don't. But at intermediate noise, you get the biggest outbreaks. New paper in PLOS Comp Biol with Kyle Dahlin, Karin Ebey, and John Vinson. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Nonlinear effects of noise on outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases

Author summary Climate change is expected to cause drastic changes in the spread of mosquito-borne disease outbreaks, both in where they occur and in their size. A key aspect of climate change is an i...

doi.org

Jepsen et al. Developing transfer functions for impact-abundance relationships in defoliating geometrid moths www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Developing transfer functions for impact-abundance relationships in defoliating geometrid moths

The outbreak regimes of forest insects are altered by climate change. This accentuates the need for a quantitative understanding of the relationship b…

sciencedirect.com

New research in #RESSystematicEnt Phylogenomic analysis of #Chelonus (Hymenoptera: #Braconidae): Systematics and coevolution with endogenous bracoviriforms doi.org/10.1111/syen.70047 #UCEs #Phylogenomics @gkergoat.bsky.social @wileyecology.bsky.social

📣 New Preprint, out now on @ecoevorxiv.bsky.social... Resource abundance can buffer trophic mismatch in a caterpillar-passerine food-chain 🌳→🐛→🐦 w/ @kenandlindasmith.bsky.social, @piedflynet.bsky.social et al. Read it here: doi.org/10.32942/X2K... ...or scroll for some highlights 🧵👇 1/4

Paper 19 is out: Conrad Schittko et al conducted a synthesis across a number of publicly available ALAN datasets that investigated effects of light intensity on ecological responses. The work highlights how many responses to ALAN occur at low (sub-lux) doses! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Universal dose–response sensitivity of ecological processes to low levels of artificial light at night

Artificial light at night (ALAN) is an emerging driver of biodiversity change, yet quantitative evidence on how biological responses scale with light …

sciencedirect.com

Ants like a morning pick-me-up too! “… under low to intermediate caffeine concentrations, ants were 38% faster with each consecutive visit, implying that caffeine boosts learning.” Bonus point for the ant people in the graphical abstract. www.cell.com/iscience/ful... #science #biology #animals