At least one of the revised code's new authors, entomologist F. Christian Thompson of the U.S. Department of Agriculture systematics laboratory at the National Museum of Natural History, wishes that the commission had not put off that step, however, and that the code had also gone further in eliminating Latin requirements so as to make it easier to automate and computerize taxonomic data.
However, says lead author Clare Hughes, an entomologist at the University of York, U.K., these features may have hidden costs that conservationists should keep in mind.
Its bulging eyes provide a broad field of vision that is useful while landing, said one of the study's authors, Mike Picker, an entomologist at the University of Cape Town.
"We have at least 100 new species of insects, possibly many more," said David Grimaldi, one of the study's authors and an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
He and a co-author, Jonathan F. Colville, an entomologist at the same university, accidentally discovered the cockroach in 2006 while looking for ant larvae.
For more on the fascinating life cycle of this wasp, visit the entertaining and informative cicada wasp Web page of Chuck Holliday, a professor of animal physiology at Lafayette College, and the "Cicada Killer Thriller Page" of his friend (and frequent co-author) Joseph Coelho, an entomologist at Quincy College.
William Reisen, the California study's lead author and a research entomologist at the Center for Vectorborne Diseases at the University of California, Davis, says that persistent drought, WNV, and other diseases such as avian pox virus had contributed to the decimation of two important local WNV hosts, western scrub jays and house finches.
One of its authors was Arnold van Huis, an entomologist who is working to establish a market for insect-based products in the Netherlands, with funding from the Dutch government; the agriculture ministry recently gave him a million euros to research insect husbandry.
(Their titles were quaintly Victorian: The Entomologist's Weekly Intelligencer; Entomologist's Gazette; The Entomologist's Record and Journal of Variation).
Lead study author Ana Cristina Pellegrino, an entomologist at Brazil's University of Sao Paolo, and her colleagues concluded that dropping pressure significantly affected the sexual behavior of the insects, but in different ways.
