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…
New Publication: Bees matter for apple pollination all over the world, especially wild ones
The relevance of pollinators for food production is widely accepted, but we still lack of information on many global crops. Within a big team led by Maxime Eeraerts, we review the current evidence of pollination in apple, a major fruit crop across the world. We found a consistent pattern of pollen limitation in crops of…
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Lab 