It’s a horror story unfolding in the west that could sweep across the country. Beware the shot-hole borer, an exotic pest that threatens our tree crops, plantations, urban forests and wild places.
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Articles on Pests
Displaying 1 - 20 of 66 articles
The trouble is most countries don’t make bed bug infestation data available to researchers.
Australia’s biosecurity system is on high alert for alien invaders. Here’s a hit list of eight baddies we believe pose the greatest threat to Australia’s biodiversity.
Alien invaders are penetrating the borders of every country in the world. Now the full extent of the problems and potential solutions have been exposed, in a new United Nations report.
Spiders liquefy their prey in order to consume it, and this makes it challenging to determine what spiders eat. A new approach that uses DNA barcoding is helping researchers figure out spider diets.
Over hundreds of million years of evolution, ants have come up with some pretty smart solutions to problems of agriculture, navigation and architecture. People could learn a thing or two.
Indonesia’s foot-and-mouth outbreak shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s been decades in the making – just the latest consequence of biosecurity shortcomings in the region.
Cowpea is an important crop in Ghana. What will a genetically modified version mean for the country’s farmers?
Bed bugs are pretty much universally reviled. But a public health entomologist explains how – while potentially traumatizing to deal with – they aren’t likely to make you sick.
With temperatures plunging, rodents have started seeking the warmth and food inside our houses. Here’s how to deal with them effectively and humanely – without accidentally catching native animals.
New research finds 74% of land managers who reported releasing a powerful biocontrol release it during the peak rabbit breeding period. This can lead to rabbit populations actually increasing.
Once the larvae turn into adult moths, they never eat again.
While some invasive animals have breached Antarctica, the continent is still pristine. Our challenge is keeping it that way.
Rabbits destroy huge numbers of critical regenerating seedlings over more than half the continent. This has devastating flow-on effects for the rest of the ecosystem. So how do we control them?
Inserting electrodes into insects helps scientists understand what attracts these insects – and, stemming from that, how to trap them and protect crops.
Imagine constantly living with mice. When you go to sleep they run across your bed, the stench of dead mice fills the street. As an expert on mouse outbreaks, let’s look at the issue in more detail.
People love to connect with nature and that’s possible with vertical gardens on high-rise developments. But gardens need a gardener to keep things under control.
If all, or even most, offspring of the survivors are shy, we could be facing an introduced pest population that is incredibly difficult to remove.
Entomologists worried about invasive pests have thousands of curious community scientists posting their findings online — and identifying new species.
A swarm of roughly 40 million desert locusts can eat the same amount of food in one day as about 35,000 people.
Top contributors
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Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of York
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Assistant Professor, Department of Entomology; African-American Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Associate Professor, University of Pretoria
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Adjunct Fellow, UNSW Sydney
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Assistant Professor, Faculty of Agriculture, Dalhousie University
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Science Director, Biosecurity Flagship, CSIRO
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Associate Professor, Ecology, Northumbria University, Newcastle
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PhD researcher, University of Utah
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Research Scientist Invasive Species, CSIRO
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Professor of Conservation Biology, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney
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Associate Professor, James Cook University
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Professor of Aquatic Biosciences, Nord University
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Research Fellow, School of Biosciences, The University of Melbourne
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CSIRO
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Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Evolutionary Ecology, Griffith University
