Do wildflower strips enhance pest control in organic cabbage?

Within this project we assess whether wildflower strips and companion plants increase the control of cabbage pests Plutella xylostella L. (Lepidoptera: Plutellidae), Mamestra brassicae L. (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) and Pieris rapae L. (Lepidoptera: Pieridae) by (1) naturally occurring parasitoids and predators and (2) mass‐releasedn Trichogramma brassciae (Bezdenko) (Hymenoptera: Trichogrammatidae) parasitoids. Two organic cabbage fields were used for this study: adjacent to each field a wildflower strip was sown and companion plants (Centaurea cyanus L. (Asteraceae)) intermixed within the crop. Within each field ~15,000 M. brassicae eggs were placed out to determine the parasitism rates by mass‐released T. brassicae and to assess the levels of egg predation. Over 1,000 lepidopteran larvae were collected and screened for hymenopteran and tachinid parasitoid DNA using a multiplex PCR assay. Invertebrate generalist predators (n=1,063) were collected for DNA‐based gut content analysis. The wildflower strip had a significant positive effect on M. brassicae egg parasitism rates as rates increased 5‐fold in the vicinity to the strip. Moreover, companion plants enhanced invertebrate predation on M. brassicae eggs. Both, the release of T. brassicae and the use of companion plants, however, did not significantly increase egg parasitism rates. The infestation of plants by caterpillars increased with distance to the wildflower strip and there was a trend of decreasing larval parasitism rates with distance to the strip. Currently the invertebrate predators are being molecularly analysed to assess predation on unparasitized and parasitized lepidopteran pests

Scaling and energy transfer in rotating turbulence

The inertial-range properties of quasi-stationary hydrodynamic turbulence under solid-body rotation are studied via high-resolution direct numerical simulations. For strong rotation the nonlinear energy cascade exhibits depletion and a pronounced anisotropy with the energy flux proceeding mainly perpendicularly to the rotation axis. This corresponds to a transition towards a quasi-two-dimensional flow similar to a linear Taylor-Proudman state. In contrast to the energy spectrum along the rotation axis which does not scale self-similarly, the perpendicular spectrum displays an inertial range with $k^{-2}_\perp$-behavior. A new phenomenology gives a rationale for the observations. The scaling exponents $\zeta_p$ of structure functions up to order $p=8$ measured perpendicular to the rotation axis indicate reduced intermittency with increasing rotation rate. The proposed phenomenology is consistent with the inferred asymptotic non-intermittent behavior $\zeta_p=p/2$.Comment: to be published in Europhysics Letters (www.epletters.net), minor changes to match version in prin

Editorial

This issue of the Bulletin of Entomological Research is a little different, in that it includes eight papers from a conference held last year at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, entitled ‘Molecular approaches to study trophic interactions: current progress and future directions’. Details of the meeting can still be found at www.mti-symposium.at. The meeting was organised to bring together researchers in the growing fields of molecular analysis of predation and parasitism. The aim was to discuss and synthesize the latest progress in these fields, to discuss techniques, to identify promising avenues for future research and to stimulate cooperation and collaboration. A major objective was also to attract those new to, or interested in, using these approaches and to provide a workshop that would help them get started and to understand the advantages and limitations of molecular approaches. The meeting was deliberately cross-discipline, bringing together people working on vertebrates and invertebrates, terrestrial and aquatic systems, but all with a common interest in trophic relationships and their study using molecular approaches. There were over 70 researchers and students from 15 countries at this highly diverse, three-day conference. Four sessions were held and introduced by keynote speakers, each an international leader in his field: Simon Jarman (Australian Antarctic Division, Australia) introduced the session on predation in aquatic systems, and Andrew King (Cardiff University, UK) provided us with an overview on predation in terrestrial systems. The session on the analysis of blood meals was opened by Steven Torr (University of Greenwich, UK), while Matt Greenstone (USDA, USA) provided (remotely) a keynote address on molecular approaches to study endoparasitism. The keynote presentations were followed by an array of highly interesting talks, complemented by posters. This special issue of Bulletin of Entomological Research, therefore, includes papers form this techniques-based meeting that are by no means all entomological. Our justification for this diversion from our usual editorial policies is that the molecular approaches used are widely applicable across taxonomic divisions. Thus, a technique developed to detect dietary components in the guts of krill might be equally useful to someone working on predation by carabid beetles or ladybirds. We make no apologies, therefore, for including papers on the gut microflora of lumbricid earthworms and the diets of rock lobsters alongside more familiar entomological studies on predation and parasitism. These papers clearly demonstrate that molecular analyses are providing us with exciting new ways to study trophic relationships within food webs in a range of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. We would like to thank all participants at the Symposium who made this conference such a rewarding and productive meeting, but especially those who have contributed to this special edition. We look forward to regular future symposia in this fast-moving field

Anarcho-Environmentalists: Ascetics of Late Modernity

This article explores experiences of environmental activism from the viewpoint of members of a radical environment group. It is based on data collected during eight months of participant observation and through semistructured interviews with ten core members and two ex-members. Working on personal feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors (self-work) was central to the strategy for social change employed by this group. Drawing on Weber's sociology of religion, this article explores the way the high expectation the activists had of themselves matched Weber's typification of the rationally active ascetic. It is argued that asceticism is an enduring element of Western culture that takes different forms in response to historical conditions. In this case, we see a form of secular asceticism that responds to the conditions of late modernity

Machine-Readable Data Production by the Federal Government

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68228/2/10.1177_000276427601900402.pd

Rapid Plant Identification Using Species- and Group-Specific Primers Targeting Chloroplast DNA

Plant identification is challenging when no morphologically assignable parts are available. There is a lack of broadly applicable methods for identifying plants in this situation, for example when roots grow in mixture and for decayed or semi-digested plant material. These difficulties have also impeded the progress made in ecological disciplines such as soil- and trophic ecology. Here, a PCR-based approach is presented which allows identifying a variety of plant taxa commonly occurring in Central European agricultural land. Based on the trnT-F cpDNA region, PCR assays were developed to identify two plant families (Poaceae and Apiaceae), the genera Trifolium and Plantago, and nine plant species: Achillea millefolium, Fagopyrum esculentum, Lolium perenne, Lupinus angustifolius, Phaseolus coccineus, Sinapis alba, Taraxacum officinale, Triticum aestivum, and Zea mays. These assays allowed identification of plants based on size-specific amplicons ranging from 116 bp to 381 bp. Their specificity and sensitivity was consistently high, enabling the detection of small amounts of plant DNA, for example, in decaying plant material and in the intestine or faeces of herbivores. To increase the efficacy of identifying plant species from large number of samples, specific primers were combined in multiplex PCRs, allowing screening for multiple species within a single reaction. The molecular assays outlined here will be applicable manifold, such as for root- and leaf litter identification, botanical trace evidence, and the analysis of herbivory

Public Response to Community Mitigation Measures for Pandemic Influenza

Results from a national survey indicated that most persons would follow public health officials’ guidelines

The Distributional Impact of Statewide Property Tax Relief: the Michigan Case

This study uses data from a random survey of 2001 Michigan households to analyze the extent to which the Michigan ctreuit-breaker has been successful in reducing the income regressivity of the property tax and in changing relative property tax burdens. Because of its relatively extensive coverage, including renters as well as homeowners and the nonaged as well as the aged, the circuit-breaker has yielded a more equal distribution of income within Michigan. Its potential to change the distribution of income depends on the particular formula utilized, but redistributional effects have thus far been lamited because program participation has been positively correlated with income. To the extent that reductions in the price ofpublic services created by the circuit-breaker are perceived by households, the biggest stimulus appears to be in high property tax/high-income countiesPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68848/2/10.1177_109114218301100201.pd

Describing Sensory Experience: The Genre of Wine Reviews

The purpose of the article is to shed light on how experiences of sensory perceptions in the domains of VISION, SMELL, TASTE and TOUCH are recast into text and discourse in the genre of wine reviews. Because of the alleged paucity of sensory vocabularies, in particular in the olfactory domain, it is of particular interest to investigate what resources language has to offer in order to describe those experiences. We show that the main resources are, on the one hand, words evoking properties that are applicable cross-modally and properties of objects that range over more than one domain, and on the other, vivid imagery that compares the characteristics of the wine with people, building, animals and the hustle and bustle of market places and other events. The second goal is to account for the construals of the meanings of the expressions used in the recontextualization into written discourse in the light of their apparent flexibility across the descriptions of the sensory experiences. In contrast to a large body of the literature on sensory meanings in language, we argue that the descriptors of properties such as sharp, soft, lemon and cherry used to describe a wine’s qualities across the sensory domains are not polysemous synesthetic metaphors, but monosemous synesthetic metonymizations, more precisely zone activations. With regard to the imagery used, the construals represented cover both similes, metaphorizations and metonymizations proper