Our highly seasonal world restricts insect activity to brief portions of the year. This feature necessitates a sophisticated interpretation of seasonal changes and enactment of mechanisms for bringing development to a halt and then reinitiating it when the inimical season is past. The dormant state of diapause serves to bridge the unfavourable seasons, and its timing provides a powerful mechanism for synchronizing insect development. This book explores how seasonal signals are monitored and used by insects to enact specific molecular pathways that generate the diapause phenotype. The broad perspective offered here scales from the ecological to the molecular and thus provides a comprehensive view of this exciting and vibrant research field, offering insights on topics ranging from pest management, evolution, speciation, climate change and disease transmission, to human health, as well as analogies with other forms of invertebrate dormancy and mammalian hibernation.

True bugs (Heteroptera) are a diverse and complex group of plant-feeding and predatory insects important to food production, human health, the global economy and the environment. Within the nearly 43,000 species described around the world, Neotropical true bugs are particularly diverse, and much remains to be discovered about their biology and relations with other species. Inspired by the need for a comprehensive assessment, True Bugs (Heteroptera) of the Neotropics is the most complete and thorough review ever published. Experts in each of the seven infraorders have drawn together the scattered literature to provide detailed treatments of each major taxon. The most common and important species as well as select lesser known species in each major family are covered, highlighting morphology, classification, biology and ecology. The numerous color illustrations highlight key species and their adaptations, and importance to basic and applied sciences is discussed. Each chapter is based on an up-to-date review of the literature, and with a bibliography of more than 3,000 references, readers are presented with an unprecedented and vital and timely account of the true bugs of the Neotropical Region.

The members of the family Tingidae are purely plant-feeding bugs that live mostly on the lower surfaces of the leaves of living plants. Systematically, lacebugs are classified in the family Tingidae of the insect order Hemiptera. As cataloged herein, the family consists of 1,820 species arranged in 3 subfamilies and 236 genera. Geographically, lacebugs are widely distributed in the torrid and temperate zones on all continents and on most islands in the oceans, although they are unknown in the frigid zones.

Heteropterans regularly cause a wide variety and large number of problems for humans - at times on a catastrophic scale. The 37,000 described species of this suborder including many pests, disease transmitters, and nuisances exist worldwide, inflicting damage on crops, forests, orchards, and human life. Inspired by the widespread economic impact of