Reproductive Maturity, Mating Status, and Long-Duration Flight Behavior of Agrotis ipsilon (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) and the Conceptual Misuse of the Oogenesis'Flight Syndrome by Entomologists

1992 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-688 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Sappington Thomas ◽  
B. Showers William
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tong Li ◽  
Ruobing Guan ◽  
Yuqing Wu ◽  
Su Chen ◽  
Guohui Yuan ◽  
...  

In the present study, we identified a novel, positive-sense single-stranded RNA virus in the Chinese black cutworm, Agrotis ipsilon. It has a genome length of 11,312 nucleotides, excluding the poly(A) tails, and contains five open reading frames. The ORF2 encodes the conserved domains of RNA helicase and RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, while ORF4 and 5 encode three viral proteins. Herein, the A. ipsilon virus was clustered with a Helicoverpa armigera Nora virus and was thus provisionally named “Agrotis ipsilon Nora virus” (AINV). AINV was successfully transmitted into a novel host, Spodoptera frugiperda, through injection, causing a stable infection. This found the possibility of horizontal AINV transmission among moths belonging to the same taxonomic family. Nonetheless, AINV infection was deleterious to S. frugiperda and mainly mediated by antiviral and amino acid metabolism-related pathways. Furthermore, the infection significantly increased the S. frugiperda larval period but significantly reduced its moth eclosion rate. It suggests that AINV is probably to be a parasitic virus of S. frugiperda.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (43) ◽  
pp. eabb2890 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rémi Pannequin ◽  
Mélanie Jouaiti ◽  
Mohamed Boutayeb ◽  
Philippe Lucas ◽  
Dominique Martinez

Flying insects have evolved to develop efficient strategies to navigate in natural environments. Yet, studying them experimentally is difficult because of their small size and high speed of motion. Consequently, previous studies were limited to tethered flights, hovering flights, or restricted flights within confined laboratory chambers. Here, we report the development of a cable-driven parallel robot, named lab-on-cables, for tracking and interacting with a free-flying insect. In this approach, cameras are mounted on cables, so as to move automatically with the insect. We designed a reactive controller that minimizes the online tracking error between the position of the flying insect, provided by an embedded stereo-vision system, and the position of the moving lab, computed from the cable lengths. We validated the lab-on-cables with Agrotis ipsilon moths (ca. 2 centimeters long) flying freely up to 3 meters per second. We further demonstrated, using prerecorded trajectories, the possibility to track other insects such as fruit flies or mosquitoes. The lab-on-cables is relevant to free-flight studies and may be used in combination with stimulus delivery to assess sensory modulation of flight behavior (e.g., pheromone-controlled anemotaxis in moths).


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