Aphids are major crop pests that are feeding on plant sap and transmitting plant viruses, thus inducing high yield losses worldwide. As chemical pesticides are decreasingly used in plant protection, fungi that cause disease to insects (entomopathogenic fungi) are one of the promising alternatives. They are commonly applied by spraying plants to protect them against herbivores. When applied, some ...

Over the last 20 years there has been a large change in the fish community structure in Lille Rostavatn, northern Norway. The relative contribution of the cold-water adapted fish species, Arctic charr (<i>Salvelinus alpinus</i>) and burbot (<i>Lota lota</i>), has distinctly decreased whereas the more temperate-adapted fish species, grayling (<i>Thymallus thymallus</i>) and brown trout (<i>Salmo ...

Epiphytic vegetation can contribute to increased knowledge on how planting of spruce in areas where spruce does not occur naturally in the landscape can affect the environment. In the current study, 31 spruce plantations in Troms and Vesterålen in North Norway were investigated, with emphasis on species abundance of macrolichens on tree trunks and branches. The main assumption was that planting of ...

Kelp forests produce large amounts of macroalgal detritus, ranging from whole plants to small particles (1 mm). The role of this kelp detritus in fueling deep-sea communities adjacent to healthy kelp forests was investigated in a region in the north of Norway by comparing the community structure and biodiversity of meio-, macro-, and megafauna in two deep (450 m) areas with different expected input ...

In recent years, ornamental shrimps gained increasing popularity in the aquarium trade. Unfortunately, they are potential vectors of epibionts, which may be unintentionally introduced to aquaria with imported shrimps. This contribution presents the first report of the occurrence of Holtodrilus truncatus on aquarium freshwater shrimp Caridina formosae. A total of 120 shrimp imported from Taiwan as ...

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are of concern because of their high persistence (or that of their degradation products) and their impacts on human and environmental health that are known or can be deduced from some well-studied PFAS. Currently, many different PFAS (on the order of several thousands) are used in a wide range of applications, and there is no comprehensive source of information ...

In September 2016, a marine ecosystem survey covered all trophic levels from phytoplankton to seals in the Arctic Ocean to the west and north of Svalbard. At the ice edge, 26 harp seals were sampled to assess whether recent environmental changes had affected their diets and body condition by comparing our current results with previous investigations conducted 2–3 decades ago in the northern Barents ...

Across taxa, circadian control of physiology and behavior arises from cell-autonomous oscillations in gene expression, governed by a networks of so-called ‘clock genes’, collectively forming transcription-translation feedback loops. In modern vertebrates, these networks contain multiple copies of clock gene family members, which arose through whole genome duplication (WGD) events during evolutionary ...

An important yet still not well documented aspect of recent changes in the Arctic Ocean is associated with the advection of anomalous sub-Arctic Atlantic- and Pacific-origin waters and biota into the polar basins, a process which we refer to as borealization. Using a 37-year archive of observations (1981–2017) we demonstrate dramatically contrasting regional responses to atlantification (that part ...

A number of virological, epidemiological and ethnographic arguments suggest that COVID-19 has a zoonotic origin. The pangolin, a species threatened with extinction due to poaching for both culinary purposes and traditional Chinese pharmacopoeia, is now suspected of being the “missing link” in the transmission to humans of a virus that probably originated in a species of bat. Our predation of wild ...