The ability to locate food is of utmost importance for animals. Insect decomposers locate their resources using volatile organic compounds, even to the extent that they can be deceived by plants that mimic the scent of their natural food resources (such as dung). Physical properties of natural resources for insect decomposers tend to change drastically during their decomposition (e.g....
Mayflies (Ephemeroptera) represent a very archaic group of insects. In a recently published paper, we presented results of our research on the Palaeozoic mayfly fossils from the Permian period.
Freshwater habitats are often structured into physically separated open water, bottom and vegetated inshore mesohabitats. Each of these mesohabitats can host a different local community and rely on different sources of energy. Interestingly, the open water communities are typically dominated by small-bodied taxa and rapid turnover in biomass, while the bottom fauna is usually larger and has a...
Around the world, more than 7,000 languages are spoken, most of them by small populations of speakers in the tropics. Papua New Guinea (PNG), where nine million people speak 850 languages, is the most linguistically diverse place on Earth. Alfred Kik, a Papua New Guinea postgraduate student at the University of South Bohemia and the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences tested, with...
Aquatic habitats vary in the amount and type of habitat complexity provided by submerged macrophytes, tree trunks and branches or (artificial) coral reefs. These structures are regularly modified in habitat management as obstacles are removed or added for the sake of convenience, flood management, or restoration purposes. These changes can profoundly affect the diversity and composition of...
Return of large native herbivores to selected areas is increasingly advocated as a cost-efficient approach to managing natural biotopes that depend on disturbance-succession dynamics and are imperilled by successional changes. We tested efficiency of this approach for insect conservation by studying butterflies of the former military training range Milovice, Czech Republic, refaunated since...
Kings and queens of termites, like reproductive individuals of other advanced eusocial insects, are endowed with admirable longevity, which dramatically exceeds the life expectancies of their non-reproducing nest-mates and related solitary insects. In this study, we tested the possible correlation between the activation of the telomerase mechanism and differential longevities of termite castes.
The trap-jaw ants are famous for having one of the natural world’s fastest movements, but the evolution of the mechanism allowing their jaw movement has been little known. In a comprehensive study published in Plos Biology, researchers led by D. Booher (USA) and E. Economo (Japan) in collaboration with Milan Janda from our institute, revealed that the mechanism itself arose multiple times...
Extracellular adenosine (Ado) was formerly considered a defensive metabolite with general protective effects on tissues. However, prolonged adenosine signaling in chronic diseases may exacerbate tissue damage. A detailed study of the nervous system in mammals shows that Ado maintains cell viability at a low degree of damage, whereas it has the opposite effect at more intense damage.
Scientists from the Institute of Entomology examined the infection by intracellular bacterium Wolbachia in Aricia and Pseudophilotes blue butterflies (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae).