Effect of Diet on Development and Reproduction of Pezothrips kellyanus (Thysanoptera: Thripidae)

The developmental time, fecundity, and longevity of Pezothrips kellyanus (Bagnall) (Thysanoptera: Thripidae) encaged on lemon, Citrus limon (L.) Burm.f., leaves supplied with different food sources (pollen, sucrose, and honey) were compared at 25 degrees C. Only the addition of pollen offered a nutritional benefit for this thrips species. Pollen to the lemon leaf reduced total developmental time from egg to adult from 12.42 to 9.68 d, increased survival from 22.6 to 80.6%, and increased fecundity. When sugar was offered, only 10% of larvae survived. P. kellyanus larvae were unable to grow on lemon leaves as well as when honey was supplied to the leaves (recorded survival was 22.6 and 42.86%, respectively), and adult females were slightly able to reproduce (1.4 and 4.2 larvae per female, respectively). Pollen and honey supplements fed to adults double and triple adult longevity, respectively

Few Product Gates but Many Zeros

Abstract A d-gem is a {+, −, ×}-circuit having very few ×-gates and computing from {x} ∪ Z a univariate polynomial of degree d having d distinct integer roots. We introduce d-gems because they could help factoring integers and because their existence for infinitely many d would blatantly disprove a variant of the Blum-Cucker-Shub-Smale conjecture. A natural step towards validating the conjecture would thus be to rule out d-gems for large d. Here we construct d-gems for several values of d up to 55. Our 2 n-gems for n ≤ 4 are skew, that is, each {+, −}-gate adds an integer. We prove that skew 2 n-gems if they exist require n {+, −}-gates, and that these for n ≥ 5 would imply new solutions to the Prouhet-Tarry-Escott problem in number theory. By contrast, skew d-gems over the real numbers are shown to exist for every d.