Squash bugs, a common and difficult-to-control agricultural pest, need healthy bacteria in their gut to grow and stay alive. However, they do not acquire any bacteria from their parents when they are ...

A discovery about how a common insect acquires a microbe that is essential for its growth may help in the control of an agricultural pest. The squash bug carries a gut bacterium that is essential for ...

Insect defecation may not seem like one of the pressing scientific inquiries of our time, but in fact the feces of these wee creatures serves an extraordinary variety of functions in bug and human ...

The squash bug carries a gut bacterium that is essential for the bug’s development into an adult. But when they hatch from their eggs, squash bug nymphs do not have the bacteria in their systems. That ...