survival

It may soon be easier to combat locust plagues. An international research team including members from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems clarified further details of how these insects, which are actually solitary creatures, form swarms. Especially in Africa, the masses of locusts repeatedly destroy large portions of harvests. As the working group discovered in a computer simulation, cannibalism, which is common among locusts, causes the insects to move across the land in swarms once a certain population density is reached.

Scientists at the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology (FIWI) of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna have now found that male Alpine chamois heterozygous at a particular immune gene locus (i.e. who possess two different forms of that gene) indeed survive significantly longer than homozygous individuals (i.e. those with two identical copies of the gene) but they found no such effect for female chamois.