New Publication: Batman or Robin? … perhaps Spidey! The complex interactions between birds, bats and spiders as natural enemies of pests in fruit orchards
Flying vertebrates such as birds and bats are well known as providers of pest control in agriculture. However, being insectivores, they may prey not only on pest insects, but also on other arthropods, like spiders, acting as natural enemies too. In this article, we tackle this issue by combining DNA-metabarcoding from dietary samples of birds,…
New Publication: Bats as pest managers in cropland: the species and the season matter
European bats are insectivorous animals able to control arthropod pests in agricultural crops. However, their role in heterogeneous landscapes remains poorly known. In this article, we analyse bats’ diet through arthropod DNA-metabarcoding from their faecal samples in a bocage landscape of Asturias, N Spain. We compared the occurrence of different pest species in different bat…
New Publication: Do ants defend honey-dew producing hemipterans from their parasitoids?
The relationship between phloem-feeding insects, like aphids, and “shepherd” ants is a paradigmatical example of mutualism in almost every Ecology textbook. However, the knowledge about how ants defend honey-dew producing hemipterans from their major enemies – parasitoids – is scarce and dispersed. Ángel Plata and their colleagues from IVIA-Valencia develop an outstanding and comprehensive review…
