History of Entomology

This article aims to reflect on the descriptions of insects exist in Portuguese colony in the New World. We used as sources treaties, letters and chronicles produced by clerics and colonizers who were in Portuguese America in its first century of European colonization. When analyzing the reports about the insect fauna in the territory newly discovered, we observed a high degree of thoroughness employed by these men to understand the peculiarities existing in nature brasílica. Considering the lower animals, and therefore originate from spontaneous generation, the colonizers set aside considerable space in his works to describe these beings who were noted both for its nutritional potential, as represented by the dangers that the maintenance of the colony.
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O presente artigo pretende fazer uma reflexão sobre as descrições de insetos existentes na colônia portuguesa do Novo Mundo. Para tanto, utilizamos como fontes documentais, tratados, cartas e crônicas produzidas pelos clérigos e colonizadores que estiveram na América portuguesa em seu primeiro século de colonização europeia. Ao analisarmos os relatos acerca da fauna entomológica existente no território recém-descoberto, observamos o alto grau de meticulosidade, empregado por esses homens, para compreender as peculiaridades existentes na natureza brasílica. Considerando-os animais inferiores e, portanto, originários de geração espontânea, os colonizadores reservaram espaço considerável em suas obras para descrever estes seres que eram observados tanto por seu potencial alimentício, quanto pelos perigos que representavam à manutenção da colônia.

This is book 1 of the second volume of Adolpho Lutz, Obra Completa [Adolpho Lutz, Complete works] edited by Jaime Larry Benchimol and Magali Romero Sá. This editorial initiative comprises volumes I, II and III, with 12 books that contain texts in Portuguese, English and German. Edited in Rio de Janeiro, by Editora Fiocruz, 2004-2007, Adolpho Lutz, Obra Completa / Adolpho Lutz, Complete works won a book prize: Prêmio Jabuti 2005 (Brazilian Chamber of Books): category Natural Sciences and Health. And received Honourable Mention by Sociedade Brasileira de Zoologia. 
The book 1 of this collection (Editora Fiocruz, 2005) contains works published or written by Adolpho Lutz on Yellow Fever, Malaria and Protozoology, and also a historical presentation produced by the editors:  BENCHIMOL, Jaime L. & SÁ, Magali Romero. “Insetos, humanos e doenças: Adolpho Lutz e a medicina tropical”/ Insects, people and disease: Adolpho Lutz and tropical medicine”, p. 43-244 [Portuguese]; p. 245-457 [English].

An experiment conducted during rabi, 2015-16 to evaluate the efficacy of bio-pesticides and indoxacarb against gram pod borer on chickpea from six treatments viz., Indoxacarb, Bacillus thuringiensis, Nuclear Polyhedrosis Virus, NSKE, Azadirachtin and Garlic extract. The indoxacarb 14.5 SC (1.0 ml/lit.) was found most effective in crop protection. NSKE (5.0 ml/ha), azadirachtin 0.3 EC (5.0 ml/lit.), HaNPV (250 LE/ha) and B. thuringiensis (1000 ml/ha) were found moderately effective in reducing pod borer population, while garlic extract (10 ml/lit.) was found least effective. The minimum pod damage (4.69%) was recorded in treatment of indoxacarb followed by NSKE (10.41%) and azadirachtin (10.84%). The maximum pod damage (14.27%) was found in garlic extract treatment, while it was 20.95% in control. The maximum seed yield was obtained in the treatment of indoxacarb 14.5 SC (16.49 q/ha) whereas it was minimum in garlic extract (10.10 q/ha) treatment. Maximum B:C ratio was obtained in the treatment indoxacarb (9.52), while minimum in garlic extract (0.17).

In this essay I sketch the contents and the context of Italian zoologist and entomologist Carlo Emery’s discussion of the germ-plasm theory. August Weismann considered him one of his very few valid supporters, and encouraged him to publish his theoretical reflections. In his Gedanken zur Descendenz- und Vererbungstheorie, which appeared between 1893 and 1903 as a series of five essays in the journal Biologisches Zentralblatt, Emery developed a very personal account applying the concept of determinants to problems like atavism, sexual dimorphism, speciation, geographical isolation, transmission of characters, and putting forward, as early as 1903, the idea of ‘genetic program’.

Relying on a database of 53 French and Swiss naturalists who collected insects in South America and the Caribbean from 1815 to 1914, this study aims to enlighten the role played in the entomological discovery of the Neotropical fauna by the official scientific expeditions, the wealthy amateurs, the missionaries, the natural history dealers and the hired naturalists.

True fruit flies belonging to family Tephritidae are serious pests that attack horticultural fruits causing severe economic losses worldwide and in Sudan. This study was carried out to assess the attraction performance of some food bait to fruit flies that infest guava and mango in Sudan during the production seasons of the year's 2007 and 2008. Torula yeast was used to monitor the relative abundance of fruit flies at Elfaki Hashim and Kassala on other hand the possibilities of extending the attra ctiveness of Torula yeast was evaluated for eight consecutive weeks.

A 1962 photomicrograph of a mosquito taken in what was then a Tanganyikan mountain
laboratory offers a prompt to consider the social salience and affective power of
scientific images. Drawing inspiration from anthropological work on photographic
practices, this article excavates the diverse geopolitical and domestic contexts of
the image’s production, consumption and circulation, so as to grasp the relationship
between scientific labors and lives. As much souvenir as ‘‘epistemic thing,’’ the
photomicrograph provides new directions in thinking about the materiality of
memory in tropical medicine.

Inspired by recent studies of Romantic botany and geology, this essay explores the intersection of the rise of the modern science of entomology and the insect poetics of the English laboring-class poet John Clare. Besides the formation of the Entomological Society of London (1833), Clare’s time saw the publication of William Spence and William Kirby’s Introduction to Entomology (1815-26), and John Curtis’s British Entomology (1824-39). Building on the common language that Romantic writers applied to the poetic imagination and the insect world (Coleridge’s “endless variety of form”), Kirby, Spence, and others traced the origins of song to insect sounds; moreover, they associated intention, mind, expression, and reception with insect motion and antennae.

Returning to the poetic entomology of the so-called Northamptonshire peasant, I argue, affords a vision of new nonhuman concepts of affect, language, aesthetics, and intelligence. A natural historian and descriptive poet, Clare builds on Kirby’s and Spence’s insights to account for the ways in which insects mediate between plant and animal kingdoms, local and global natures, and textual and real materials (ink and paper derived in part from insect life during the period). Coordinating the perceptive powers of the nature poet and the entomologist, Clare aligns the size, complexity, and camouflage of what he terms the “insect-world” (The Shepherd’s Calendar, [1827]) with the brevity, subtlety, and opacity of lyric form (Keats, Smith, and Wordsworth also wrote sonnets on insects).

Romantic entomology, which includes Clare’s farsighted poetic vision of weather-wise beetles, signifying grasshoppers, and ant architects, not only revises the “animal claim” that Tobias Menely has recently identified with the poetics of sensibility, but also anticipates present-day scientific discussions of nonhuman forms of rhythm, memory, temporality (the term “beetle” is an archaic word for “clock”), organization, and mass communication. To be sure, buzzing Romantic-era bugs suggest, on the one hand, the swarming clouds of universal pestilence, and, on the other, the juvenile microenvironments of minute ephemera. Simultaneously accounting for human famines and insect victims (the minute and helpless prey of the sporting boys and stalking birds whose songs scholars have more often analyzed), Clare’s insect poetics figures and anticipates a twenty-first century concern: a species capable of simultaneously representing the agent and object of ecological calamity.

While some seventeenth-century scholars promoted natural history as the basis of natural philosophy, they continued to debate how it should be written, about what and by whom. This look into the studios of two Amsterdam physicians, Jan Swammerdam (1637–80) and Steven Blankaart (1650–1705), explores natural history as a project in the making during the second half of the seventeenth century. Swammerdam and Blankaart approached natural history very differently, with different objectives, and relying on different traditions of handling specimens and organizing knowledge on paper, especially with regard to the way that individual observations might be generalized. These traditions varied from collating individual dissections into histories, writing both general and particular histories of plants and animals, collecting medical observations and applying inductive reasoning. Swammerdam identified the essential changes that insects underwent during their life cycle, described four orders based on these ‘general characteristics’ and presented his findings in specific histories that exemplified the ‘general rule’ of each order. Blankaart looked to the collective observations of amateurs to support his reputation as a man of medicine, but this was not supposed to lead to any kind of generalization. Their work alerts us to the variety of observational practices that were available to them, and with what purposes they made these their own.

This paper examines the organization of the Regional Entomological Congresses that took place in the 1880s in Odessa and Kharkov following outbreaks of the “kuzka grain beetle” (Anisoplia austriaca). These Congresses represented the first steps towards the professionalization of agricultural entomology within Russia. The “kuzka grain beetle” as well as other pests emerged the serious agronomical problem in the second half of the nineteenth century in South Russia and contributed to the eroding of the food security of the region. All of the southern provinces suffered losses in agricultural trade due to pest insect outbreaks, but it was Odessa – the largest trade, cultural and scientific center in southern Russia at this time – that emerged to play a central role in the professionalization of applied entomology. The paper examines the initial efforts of naturalists and regional authorities to address the growing problem of pest infestation through a hesitant but developing dialogue with landowners and various layers of centralized state administration. The resultant Regional Entomological Congresses (1878-1889) were an exceptional phenomenon, both for science as well as for the public life of the region, and represented one of the very few cases of inter-provincial zemstvo cooperation. While the Entomological Congresses were unable to provide a swift resolution to the pest issue, they were effective in raising awareness of the problem within the various layers of Russian society

The experiment was carried out at SKRAU, Bikaner (Raj.) in the year 2015-16. According to physical characters the highest per cent infestation of fruit fly on number basis and weight basis was recorded in the 7 th SMW (45.33%) followed by 6 th SMW (46.66%) and 02 nd SMW (52.49%) followed by 01 st SMW(49.78%) respectively. The lowest per cent infestation was recorded in the 46 th & 47 th SMW (5.33 %) followed by 48 th SMW (6.66%) on number basis and 46 th SMW (6.37%) followed by 47 th SMW (6.92%) on weight basis respectively.

While some seventeenth-century scholars promoted natural history as the basis of natural philosophy, they continued to debate how it should be written, about what and by whom. This look into the studios of two Amsterdam physicians, Jan Swammerdam (1637–80) and Steven Blankaart (1650–1705), explores natural history as a project in the making during the second half of the seventeenth century. Swammerdam and Blankaart approached natural history very differently, with different objectives, and relying on different traditions of handling specimens and organizing knowledge on paper, especially with regard to the way that individual observations might be generalized. These traditions varied from collating individual dissections into histories, writing both general and particular histories of plants and animals, collecting medical observations and applying inductive reasoning. Swammerdam identified the essential changes that insects underwent during their life cycle, described four orders b...

A brief art history of butterfly illustration with special focus on William Jones in:
Iconotypes A compendium of butterflies and moths. Jones’s Icones Complete;  published by Thames & Hudson in partnership with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History:
An enhanced facsimile of Jones's Icones, one of the most scientifically important and visually stunning works on butterflies and moths ever created.

Resumen William Morton Wheeler fue un científico estadounidense que llegó a conver-tirse en un experto en hormigas a principios del siglo XX. Esta breve biografía permite decir mucho no solo sobre su persona, sino sobre el contexto en el cual desarrolló su trabajo. Su formación y trayectoria académica nos informan de la diversidad de enfoques de una naciente biología: desde la tradición de la his-toria natural, distintiva de los museos, pasando por el trabajo en campo y lue-go la aproximación experimental en los laboratorios. También dan cuenta de la proyección que puede tener el estudio de grupos particulares de organismos, en este caso de las hormigas, y de cómo los científicos llegan a abrazar deter-minadas especialidades. La vida de Wheeler es una ventana por la cual pode-mos asomarnos a la historia de la construcción de la biología en los Estados Unidos, con sus influencias europeas, pero también con poderosas figuras nor-teamericanas que construyeron las disciplinas de las ciencias de la vida. Palabras clave: William Morton Wheeler, Mirmecología, Historia Natural, nueva biología. Abstract William Morton Wheeler was an American scientist who became an ant expert in the early twentieth century. This brief biography allows us to address not only his life as a scientist, but also the context in which he developed his work. His training and academic trajectory informs us about the diversity of approaches of a nascent biology: from the traditional natural history, associated with museums, through field work and then the experimental approach made in laboratories. This text also gives an account of the projection that the study of particular groups of organisms may have, as the ants in this case, and how scientists come to embrace certain specialties. Wheeler's life is a window through which we can peek into the history of the construction of biology in the United States, with its European influences, but also with powerful Amer-ican figures who built the disciplines of the life sciences.