The latest scientific discoveries in haiku form – sciku!
Hungarian men
hungering for a snack should
hunger no more – bugs!
A questionnaire of consumers in Hungary found that almost 60% of respondents were aware of eating insects as an alternative to meat, however high food neophobia is still a barrier for actually consuming insects. Men were more likely to consider trying insects than women, but a ‘willingness to eat insect-based food products could be increased by giving more information to consumers’. Gere et al, 2017.
How safe the trader?
The agricultural costs
of invasive pests
Invasive pest species threaten global agriculture and can devastate crops. A study of almost 1,300 agricultural invasive species and 124 countries suggests that whilst the biggest agricultural producers (USA and China) “could experience the greatest absolute costs from further species invasion”, their trade patterns mean they are also the greatest potential source of invasive species and so represent the greatest threat to the rest of the world. In contrast, the countries most vulnerable to invasive species were found to be from Sub-Saharan Africa. Paini et al, 2017.
Lugging worker ants
use a celestial compass.
Is this a moonwalk?
Ants often need to walk backwards when dragging heavy food items to their nests, but how do they navigate when moving in reverse? Rather than relying on visual memories of terrestrial cues, ants instead use their celestial compass – this can be disrupted by presenting ants with a mirror image of the sun’s position in the sky. Schwarz et al, 2017.
Original research: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.12.019