Why your brain is like an ant colony: they both get wiser and more stable by using collective memory for learning

In the 1980s, roughly 4.5 million monarchs wintered in California, but at last count, there may be as few as 30,000. The hillside groves of eucalyptus trees that tower over the Santa Cruz shoreline would, not so long ago, be teeming with monarch butterflies at this time of year. Boughs would be bent under the weight of black and orange clusters, as hundreds of thousands of the magical invertebrates nestled into the leaves, waiting out the frost on the California coast before returning north.

Altered peptides from a South American wasp’s venom can kill bacteria but are nontoxic to human cells.

Many scientists think the planet wouldn’t much miss mosquitoes.

Parasites that control the behavior of their hosts for their own benefit are a well-documented natural phenomenon, but the discovery of a previously unknown relationship between a parasitic wasp and a social spider is particularly upsetting.

There’s not much to be grateful for after the great Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count this year. The three-week volunteer effort in California dispatches scores of volunteers to hunt in their woods, backyards, and fields in search for the colorful migrating butterfly.

It is the mysterious substance that turns worker honeybees into queens and fills the shelves of health food shops which tout its unverified powers to fend off ageing, improve fertility and reinvigorate the immune system. Whether royal jelly has genuine health benefits for humans is a matter for more research, but in a study scientists have cracked one of the most enduring puzzles surrounding the milky gloop: the secret behind its queen-maker magic.

Bees may soon get an ally in their fight against bacterial disease — one of the most serious threats the pollinators face — in the form of an edible vaccine. That's the promise held out by researchers in Finland, who say they've made the first-ever vaccine for insects, aimed at helping struggling honeybee populations.

Found in the Amazon rainforest, this incredible arachnid looks like a strange cross between a dog and a spider.

The nests of Florida ants called Formica archboldi are adorned with the carcasses of their enemies — namely, the heads of other species known as trap-jaw ants. How Formica archboldi acquire these gruesome home accessories has perplexed scientists since the 1950s. But now, thanks to high-speed and time lapse videos, we have a better picture of this bizarre behavior.

Two hundred million mounds of dirt dot an area about the size of Great Britain in a tropical forest in northeastern Brazil. The cone-shaped dirt piles are roughly twice as tall as the average American man and stretch 30 feet across at the base. The mounds, the work of countless generations of termites, rise from the earth every 65 feet or so and are visible from space.

A species of warmongering sub-Saharan ant not only rescues its battle-wounded soldiers but also treats their injuries. This strikingly unusual behavior raises the survival rate for injured ants from a mere 20 percent to 90 percent, according to new research published Feb. 13 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?

The beetles are New England’s most endangered species. Now scientists have begun an unlikely effort to return them to the banks of the Connecticut River.

New ultra-slow-motion footage captures aggressive roach defense mechanisms

Climate change could reduce fertility rates in male insects by at least half, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications. This is bad news for bugs and humans alike, because insects play a crucial role in pollinating our crops and stabilizing many of the food webs and ecosystems that we rely on. Led by Kirs Sales, a postgraduate researcher at the University of East Anglia in the UK, the research found that increasingly intense heat waves pose a serious threat to the reproductive fitness of insects worldwide.

Termites have moved an insane amount of soil over 4,000 years

Britain's native bee species face being “wiped out” by a "highly aggressive" Asian hornet, conservationists have warned after the invasive insect was spotted in two locations at opposite ends of the country. The honey bee-killing Asian hornet, which is believed to have first arrived in Europe on crates imported from China to France in 2004, has been confirmed at locations in Liskeard, Cornwall and Hull. The creature, which is smaller than the UK's native hornet, poses no greater risk to humans than the humble wasp, but feasts on honey bees and is capable of killing around 50 a day.

Scientists demonstrate that a "gene drive" can rapidly spread a genetic mutation through a species, perhaps providing a potent new weapon against malaria. But there are plenty of skeptics.

The Pentagon is studying whether insects can be enlisted to combat crop loss during agricultural emergencies.

The long read: Beekeepers are sounding the alarm about the latest developments in genetically modified pollinators

Think of it as a biological antenna. Researchers have discovered a species of butterfly that enlarges its wing veins to pick up sounds it wouldn’t otherwise hear—a strategy that may be critical to its survival. Many butterflies possess tiny ears, often in the form of membrane-covered cavities at the base of their forewings. But scientists didn’t know the insects could boost their hearing with other parts of their bodies.

Very quietly, and without any formal announcement, the Common Names Committee of the Entomological Society of America has decided to list termites in the same category as cockroaches. It seem weird to lump the two together, but it’s a move that scientists have been considering for nearly a century.

These uniquely versatile bugs are decimating crops and infiltrating houses all across the country. Will we ever be able to get rid of them?

Ants have an incredible instinct to help their comrades.

Is an insect Armageddon afoot?

Researchers say bees understand the concept of nothing, or zero. But do we understand what that means?

US farmers are planting more and more acres with seeds coated with neonicotinoid pesticides. An ecologist explains why this approach is overkill and may be doing more harm than good.

Two billion people around the world already eat bugs, a number that's rising as more people count the environmental costs of meat.

But the infection is surging elsewhere, particularly in the Americas.

For the first time in 50 years, a new tick species has arrived in the United States — one that in its Asian home range carries fearsome diseases. The Asian long-horned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis, is spreading rapidly along the Eastern Seaboard. It has been found in seven states and in the heavily populated suburbs of New York City.

By releasing specially bred mosquitoes that can't transmit viruses, scientists have been able to virtually eradicate dengue fever from the city of Townsville, Queensland, in north-eastern Australia – and they say the same methods could be scaled up

Mating may last anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours

The discovery is among the strongest evidence in the fossil record that the insects pollinated prehistoric cycads, a plant that preceded flowering plants.

Nearly 700 million people suffer from mosquito-borne diseases—such as malaria, West Nile, Zika and dengue fever—each year, resulting in more than 1 million deaths. Increasingly, many species of mosquitoes have become resistant to the popular pyrethroid-based insecticides. Today, researchers report a new class of mosquito repellents based on naturally occurring compounds that are effective in repelling mosquitoes with potentially fewer environmental side effects than existing repellents.