Among the so-called sheep breeders interested in biological inheritance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and well before Gregor Johann Mendel, J. M. Ehrenfels (1767–1843) produced some of the most cogent writings on the subject. Although earlier in his career Ehrenfels was a strong advocate of environmental factors as influencers on the appearance of organisms, as a result of his discussions with Imre Festetics, he became convinced that whatever is passed from parents to progeny is more important and it is dependent on a “genetic force, the mother of all living things”. The sheep breeders kept issues of inheritance at the forefront of the Central European cultural context late into the nineteenth century.

The upheavals of late eighteenth century Europe encouraged people to demand greater liberties, including the freedom to explore the natural world, individually or as part of investigative associations. The Moravian Agricultural and Natural Science Society, organized by Christian Carl André, was one such group of keen practitioners of theoretical and applied scientific disciplines. Headquartered in the "Moravian Manchester" Brünn (nowadays Brno), the centre of the textile industry, society members debated the improvement of sheep wool to fulfil the needs of the Habsburg armies fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. Wool, as the raw material of soldiers' clothing, could influence the war's outcome. During the early nineteenth century, wool united politics, economics, and science in Brno, where breeders and natural scientists investigated the possibilities of increasing wool production. They regularly discussed how "climate" or "seed" characteristics influenced wool quality and quantity. Breeders and academics put their knowledge into immediate practice to create sheep with better wool traits through consanguineous matching of animals and artificial selection. This apparent disregard for the incest taboo, however, was viewed as violating natural laws and cultural norms. The debate intensified between 1817 and 1820, when a Hungarian veteran soldier, sheep breeder, and self-taught natural scientist, Imre (Emmerich) Festetics, displayed his inbred Mimush sheep, which yielded wool extremely well suited for the fabrication of light but strong garments. Members of the Society questioned whether such "bastard sheep" would be prone to climatic degeneration, should be regarded as freaks of nature, or could be explained by natural laws. The exploration of inbreeding in sheep began to be distilled into hereditary principles that culminated in 1819 with Festetics's "laws of organic functions" and "genetic laws of nature," four decades before Gregor Johann Mendel's seminal work on heredity in peas.

Heredity is such a fundamental concept that it is hard to imagine a world where the connection between parents and offspring is not understood. Three hundred years ago thinking of the phenomenon of heredity bore on a cluster of distinct philosophical questions inherited from antiquity concerning the nature and origin of substances or beings that lacked biological meaning. We are reminded of this philosophical heritage by the fact that in the 18th century the study of reproduction, embryology and development was referred to as "the science of generation". It is now clear that reproduction, the biological process by which parents produce offspring, is a fundamental feature of all life on Earth. Heredity, the transmission of traits from parents to offspring via sexual or asexual reproduction, allows differences between individuals to accumulate and evolve through natural selection. Genetics is the study of heredity, and in particular, variation of fundamental units responsible for heredity. Ideas underlying this theory evolved in considerably different and unrelated ways across a number of knowledge domains, including philosophy, medicine, natural history, and breeding. The fusion of these different domains into a single comprehensive theory in 19th century biology was a historically and culturally interdependent process, thus examining genetic prehistory should unravel these entanglements. The major goal of our review is tracing the various threads of thought that gradually converged into our contemporary understanding of heredity.

The nineteenth century was a time of great economic, social, and political change. The population of a modernizing Europe began demanding more freedom, which in turn propelled the ongoing discussion on the philosophy of nature. This spurred on Central European sheep breeders to debate the deepest secrets of nature: the transmission of traits from one generation to another. Scholarly questions of heredity were profoundly entwined with philosophy and politics when particular awareness of “the genetic laws of nature” claimed natural equality. The realization that the same rules of inheritance may apply to all living beings frightened both the absolutist political power and the divided society of the day. Many were not prepared to separate religious questions from novel natural phenomena. Open-minded breeders put their knowledge into practice right away to create sheep with better wool traits through inbreeding and artificial selection. This was viewed, however, as the artificial modification of nature operating against the cultural and religious norms of the day. Liberal attempts caught the attention of the secret police and, consequently, the aspirations of scholars were suppressed by political will during approximately 1820–1850.

The class of plant exudates that contain the phenol functionality, termed phenolics, is defined, surveyed, and characterized by solid-state 13C NMR spectroscopy and by solution-state 1H NMR spectroscopy. Materials in this group are identified by the phenolic 13C resonance (from the ipso carbon of ArOH) at δ 145-160 (δ 160-167 for ArOR). The resonance patterns define several subclasses based on the collective similarity of their 13C spectra, specifically, aloetics from the genus Aloe, guaiacs from the genus Guaiacum and other eurosid and conifer genera, xanthics from the genus Garcinia, and kinos from the genus Eucalyptus and many other genera. Phenolic exudates often are mixed with terpenoid materials (the building block of exudates known as resins) and carbohydrates (the building block of exudates known as gums) to form hybrid subgroups such as guaiac gums, guaiac resins, and kino resins. There are numerous phenolic exudates not affiliated with any of these groups, both as pure phenolics and as hybrids (phenolic resins, phenolic gum resins, and phenolic waxes).

Structural changes caused by heating of fossilized (amber) and semifossilized (copal) resins have been examined by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. A set of 28 samples was constituted to include different geographical sources, degrees of maturation, colors, and structural groupings. The onset of structural alterations was determined by observation of the lowest temperature at which spectral changes occurred. Both proton spectra in solution and carbon-13? spectra in the solid state then were recorded of cooled samples after heating for 12 hr at temperature increments, until liquification of the sample began. The spectra of both nuclides exhibit loss of a few peaks, broadening of most peaks, and enhancement of the unsaturated or aromatic region at the expense of saturated resonances. Such changes are irreversible and lead to a harder and less soluble material on cooling. The changes parallel those that occur with maturation of fossil resins or materials that lead to coal.

In the spring of 1987, I was pursuing a dissertation on a genus of phytophagous insects.Therefore, I decided to garner a greater understanding of insect-plant interactions by taking botany courses.That is how my love for plants, whose seed had been planted by my paternal grandmother, Pina, and by a legendary botany professor in Puerto Rico, Roy Woodbury (Santiago-Blay et al. 2004), germinated and has grown ever since.For years, I have seen the biological world with a different understanding of and appreciation for it.Three decades after I took a professional and personal life-changing course, Principles of Plant Morphology (Botany 105) with one of the masters of the craft, Dr. Donald R. Kaplan (Department of Botany, University of California, Berkeley), I had the opportunity to teach a research course in plant morphology elsewhere.Plant morphology, whether external or internal, the latter also known as plant anatomy, as well as plant development are taught using different pedagogical approaches and with different conceptual emphases.Beck's An Introduction to Plant Structure and Development represents an example of what I like to refer to as a "traditional" conceptual emphasis.A course taught this way begins with cells (or lower rungs of the biological hierarchy) and it tends to stay at the levels of tissues and organs.Esau (1977) as well as her other well-known and valuable botanical anatomy books are examples of this approach as are Stevens (1911), Jeffrey (1922), Eames (1936), Maheshwari (1951), and Fahn (1974), to give a few examples.Depending on the book, different areas of botany are emphasized, including anatomy, physiology, development, different plant groups, or microscopy techniques.This approach tends to diminish its emphasis on the equally valuable and complementary whole-organism approach.

Wild bees are not honeybees, Apis mellifera.Wild bees do not have hives, instead many species nest in the ground, and most of them cannot sting.In fact, there are about 4,000 different species of bees in North America, some of which do not have scientific names.Almost all wild bees are single moms, feeding their young pollen from selected types of plants.How can we protect wild bees?Protect their plants.Wild bees use pollen and nectar from our native plant communities.The more diversity of plants, the more bees are protected.Shift your lawn area to bee area by planting blooming native plants and shrubs.This is something we all can participate in.The images reproduced below come from a poster entitled, 25 Facts about Bees, prepared for the United Nations World Bee Day by Sam Droege.Additional information on World Bee Day can be found here: https:

Two endemic arthropods, the harvestman, Yunquenus portoricanus, and the millipede, Spirobolellus richmondi, from a humid montane forest in Puerto Rico, are first reported to fluoresce when they are illuminated with ultraviolet light (360 nm). Both species are relatively small, nocturnal dwellers and have a dark exoskeleton, three attributes that make them almost imperceptible during night surveys using white lights. The use of UV illumination enhances the detection of these animals during field surveys.

This index includes topic and authors (alphabetized by last name) of every paper published in Life: The Excitement of Biology volume 6. The first number of an entry indicates the volume followed (parenthetically, by the issue) and the first page of the corresponding paper. For example, articles that emphasize global climate change are located on 6(2):27 and 6(3):108. This means, that the interested reader should look for information on climate change beginning on pages 27 and 108 of the second and third issues, respectively, of Life: The Excitement of Biology, volume 6.

Ventilatory movements were recorded in four species of lepidopteran pupae, as large as 11.5g (Pseudosphinx tetrio) and as small as 0.0015g (Phyllonorycter strigulatella). The ventilatory movements and ventilatory extracardiac pulsations in haemocoelic pressure were monitored by several electronic methods (strain-gauge recording of abdominal movements, recording of pulsations in haemocoelic pressure, thermographic recording of heartbeat, microrespirographic recording of O2 consumption and CO2 output, and nanoanemometric recording of inspirations and expirations through individual spiracles). It appears that all investigated insect pupae, whether large or small, carefully avoided breathing based on gaseous diffusion. Instead, the pupae actively ventilated their tracheal systems, exchanging respiratory gases and preventing respiratory water loss. Further, it was found that larvae and pupae of Cossus cossus, which were used circa 100 years ago as experimental evidence for creating the well-known “Krogh ́s diffusion theory of insect respiration”, exhibited beautiful concerts of previously overlooked ventilatory abdominal movements and ventilatory extracardiac pulsations. These results conflict with the indicated diffusion theory, which claimed that these insects did not need to exhibit ventilatory movements at all. Unfortunately, the diffusion theory has persisted until the present due to the lack of exact experimental data. The evidence that we now provide by means of advanced electronic methods shows a widespread occurrence of ventilatory movements. Even immobile insect pupae with low respiratory metabolism exhibit distinctive ventilatory movements. The movements are quite inconspicuous, occurring in the range of micrometers or nanometers, which obviously were imperceptible to earlier investigators. These results confirm our previous findings of human-like insect breathing, based on convective inhalation and exhalation of air driven by the respectively decreased or increased haemocoelic pressure. The results further confirm the control of insect respiration by an autonomic (brain independent), neuroendocrine system known as the coelopulse system, which consists of the nervous centre located in the mesothoracic ganglion of the ventral nerve cord, the neuromotoric spiracular nerves and the intersegmental or dorsoventral abdominal muscles. The system functions as the abdominal 1 Submitted on April 28, 2017. Accepted on June 13, 2017. Last revisions received on June 20, 2017. 2 Laboratory of Insect Physiology, INTERECO, Evropská 674, 160 00 Prague, Czech Republic. Email: karel.slama34@gmail.com 3 217 Wynwood Road, York, Pennsylvania 17402 USA. E-mail: blayjorge@gmail.com DOI: 10.9784/LEB5(1)Slama.01 Electronically available on June 23, 2017. Mailed on June 23, 2017. Life: The Excitement of Biology 5(1) 5 pressure pump. The high-resolution nanoanemometric recordings revealed original data on the movement of air across insect spiracles. The results can be summarized as follows: 1. Spiracular valves open and close in short flutters lasting usually 50 to 250 msec; 2. Active opening of the valves is faster and shorter than their more or less passive closure; 3. Each spiracle can be used for inspirations as well as for expirations of air, depending on its synchronization with the increasing or decreasing phase of the haemocoelic pressure; 4. The contralateral spiracles on each segment can flutter in synchrony or independently, or flutter in synchrony with spiracles on other segments; 5. A spiracles on the same body segment can be used for inspiration, while the contralateral one can be simultaneously used for expiration; 6. Multiple spiracles on different body segments can flutter in concert with other groups of spiracles; 7. A diapausing pupa of Manduca sexta can use only one master spiracle for several hours (usually the left thoracic one), which could open in flutters of 250 msec, once in 3 min.; 8. Some spiracles can open the valves in synchrony with the rising phase of haemocoelic pressure (expiration), while others open at the decreasing pressure phase (passive suction inspiration), which results in a unidirectional ventilation of the whole tracheal system; 9. During extracardiac pulsation in haemocoelic pressure, spiracular valves are programmed to open and close in synchrony with the pulse frequency (previously known as the fluttering spiracles); 10. Coordination of spiracular valve fluttering with the rising or falling haemocoelic pressure is integrated by the coelopulse neuroendocrine system. In summary, these facts seem to provide sufficient experimental evidence to show that insect respiration is controlled by actively regulated ventilation, not by passive diffusion of gas through the spiracles. Curiously enough, we found that the anatomical structure and physiological functions of the insect coelopulse system appear to display similarities with that of the autonomic, parasympathetic neuroendocrine system of the human body. The striking similarity between the two, phylogenetically distant respiratory systems is described and the possibility that insects and humans could evolve respiratory systems based on identical principles is emphasized.

A number of blocks of resinous materials were found in the cargo of a 12th- to 13th-century shipwreck, discovered in the late 1980s in the Java Sea near the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java and excavated in 1996. These well-preserved blocks presumably were trade materials used for religious, medicinal, cosmetic, decorative or practical purposes. Such materials, derived from plants and termed exudates, generally include frankincense, myrrh, ‘gum benjamin’, liquidambar, dragon's blood, dammar, copal and amber. The source of the cargo resin could not be determined from the site. Investigation by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy has revealed that the molecular structure corresponds to that of modern resin from the plant family Dipterocarpaceae, known in trade as dammar and closely resembling Group B copal and amber. Other molecular classes of exudates are excluded. Such materials are not present in the Middle East, which then cannot be their source. The NMR spectra differ from those of Group B samples from Australia, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, but resemble those from India or Japan. The spectra indicate that the saline environment had a similar effect on the molecular structure to heating and aging.

Myths, like people, can be deceptive

Antennae are important, insect sensory organs that are used principally for communication with other insects and the detection of environmental cues. Some insects independently evolved ramified (branched) antennae, which house several types of sensilla for motion detection, sensing olfactory and chemical cues, and determining humidity and temperature levels. Though ramified antennae are common in living insects, occasionally they are present in the Mesozoic fossil record. Here, we present the first caddisflies with ramified antennae, the earliest known fossil sawfly, and a scorpionfly also with ramified antennae from the mid-Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Northeastern China, dated at 125 million years ago (Ma). These three insect taxa with ramified antennae consist of three unrelated lineages and provide evidence for broad structural convergence that historically has been best demonstrated by features such as convergent mouthparts. In addition, ramified antennae in these Mid-Mesozoic lineages likely do not constitute a key innovation, as they are not associated with significantly increased diversification compared with closely related lineages lacking this trait, and nor are they ecologically isolated from numerous, co-occurring insect species with unmodified antennae.

Rarely encountered exudates from the spore-bearing ferns and from the seedbearing living-fossil cycads, ginkgo, and gnetophytes have been examined in the bulk solid by carbon-13 nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and in some cases in solution with hydrogen NMR spectra.All 18 cycad samples proved to be gums, i.e., polycarbohydrates, as was one of the ferns.The two ginkgo samples and the other two ferns produced phenolic-based exudates.The single gnetophyte exudate was of an unknown and unique composition containing carbohydrate, saturated, and unsaturated components.None of the exudates proved to be resins (terpene-based materials), which are the most common molecular composition of exudates produced by conifers and flowering plants.