Insects

In 1991, when Marlene Zuk visited Hawaii, she did what every visitor to the islands wants to do.

"I said, 'I'll see if there are any crickets there that I can dissect for parasites,' " she said. "Doesn't everyone?"

Zuk, a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, studies crickets along with some other animals. She recently published "Sex on Six Legs," her third book about the sex lives, and other interesting behaviors, of insects.

The book details intriguing elements of the bug world, such as how the genitals of male honeybees explode after they have sex, how mother earwigs care for and feed their young, and how a particular female wasp poisons the brain of a cockroach just enough so that she can use its antennae to steer it to her nest, where it becomes food for her brood.

LOS ANGELES -- California agricultural officials will release hundreds of tiny, stinger-less wasps this month to combat the fruit- and leaf-eating light-brown apple moth, in a move to find alternatives to aerial pesticide spraying.

The mystery behind the remarkable ability of fire ants to turn themselves into a living, crawling life raft has been unlocked by scientists: The insects use air pockets that form around their bodies to protect themselves from drowning.

The analysis, published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could one day provide a useful model for building robots that can perform complex functions quickly and cooperatively, the study authors said.