Breaking News, Latest Philippines Headlines, World, Entertainment, Politics, Weather & Video News
By Sami ACEF with David COURBET in Marseille PARIS, Oct 3, 2023 (AFP) – The French government said Tuesday it would host emergency meetings this week to examine surging numbers of reported bedbug cases, which are being increasingly seen as a major potential public health problem. Bedbugs have in recent weeks gone from being a subject of potential derision to a contentious political issue in France, with aghast citizens reporting seeing the creatures in locations […]
by Marlowe HOOD Agence France Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — Nearly half of all insect species worldwide are in rapid decline and a third could disappear altogether, according to a study warning of dire consequences for crop pollination and natural food chains. “Unless we change our way of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades,” concluded the peer-reviewed study, which is set for publication in […]
MEXICO CITY (AFP) — The monarch butterfly population in Mexico has grown by 144 percent compared to last year. Despite the increase, activists warn that this migratory phenomenon is still in danger. https://youtu.be/KJ8oPj_JLco
by Patrick GALEY Agence France-Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — Leaf-cutter ants build super highways to transfer food and building materials hundreds of meters without communicating with each other, scientists claimed Wednesday, in findings that could prompt a rethink about how some insect communities organize themselves. Each leaf-cutter colony can carve out nearly three kilometers of trails from the forest floor every year, investing an average of 11,000 hours into constructing and maintaining them. It had […]
by Patrick GALEY Agence France Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — Leaf-cutter ants build superhighways to transfer food and building materials hundreds of meters without communicating with each other, scientists claimed Wednesday, in findings that could prompt a rethink about how some insect communities organize themselves. Each leaf-cutter colony can carve out nearly three kilometers of trails from the forest floor every year, investing an average of 11,000 hours into constructing and maintaining them. It had […]
by William WROBLEWSKI Agence France-Presse COROICO, Bolivia (AFP) — High up in the Bolivian cloud forest, a woman tends to her bees, smoker in hand, working from hive to hive under a canopy of leaves to delicately gather panels of honeycomb. It’s a bucolic scene that experts say won’t last, for the bees are dying. The culprit — as in so many other cases across the world — is pesticide. The difference in Bolivia is […]
HELSINKI, Finland (AFP)- Scientists in Finland have developed what they believe is the world’s first vaccine to protect bees against disease, raising hopes for tackling the drastic decline in insect numbers which could cause a global food crisis. Bees are vital for growing the world’s food as they help fertilize three out of four crops around the globe, by transferring pollen from male to female flowers. But in recent years bee populations around the world have been […]
by Mariëtte Le Roux Agence France-Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — Dinosaurs, the most fearsome creatures ever to walk the Earth, were bugged already 100 million years ago by a paltry pest that still plagues animals today: the bloodsucking tick, scientists have discovered. Preserved for eternity in amber, fossilised tree resin, researchers have found a hard tick — uncannily similar to those we know — clinging to a 99-million-year-old dinosaur feather, a team wrote in the […]
by Isabel Malsang and Solange Uwimana Agence France-Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — To check the beehives he has set up on the roof of the sprawling Monnaie de Paris on the banks of the River Seine, Audric de Campeau slips on a harness over tan-colored trousers. The beekeeper then hooks his leg harness to a metal cable anchored to the roof’s edge, running the length of the entire structure. “It’s not dangerous, but my insurance […]
SYDNEY, Australia (AFP) — A species of spider that usually travels no further than a few feet from where it was hatched, likely made an epic sea journey on a “land raft” from South Africa to call Australia home, a study said Thursday. The Australian trapdoor spider, known scientifically as Moggridgea rainbow, is only found on Kangaroo Island off the south Australian coast and lives a sedentary land-based lifestyle, rarely moving far. Research in the […]
by Marlowe HOOD PARIS, France (AFP) — Invasive insects cause at least $77 billion (69 billion euros) in damage every year, according to a study released Tuesday that says this figure is “grossly underestimated” because it covers only a fraction of the globe. Climate change is on track to boost the area affected by nearly 20 percent before mid-century, the authors reported in the journal Nature Communications. Canvassing more than 700 recent scientific studies, researchers […]
