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Background: The endless struggle to survive has driven harmless species to evolve elaborate strategies of deceiving predators. Batesian mimicry involves imitations of noxious species' warning signals by palatable mimics. Clearwing moths (Lepidoptera: Sesiidae), incapable of inflicting painful bites or stings, resemble bees or wasps in their morphology and sometimes imitate their behaviours. An entirely unexplored type of deception in sesiids is acoustic mimicry. We recorded the buzzing sounds of two species of Southeast Asian clearwing moths, Heterosphecia pahangensis and H. hyaloptera and compared them to their visual model bee, Tetragonilla collina, and two control species of bees occurring in the same habitat. Recordings were performed on untethered, flying insects in nature., Results: Based on eight acoustic parameters and wingbeat frequencies calculated from slow-motion videos, we found that the buzzes produced by both clearwing moths highly resemble those of T. collina but differ from the two control species of bees., Conclusions: Acoustic similarities to bees, alongside morphological and behavioural imitations, indicate that clearwing moths display multimodal mimicry of their evolutionary models.

A clearwing moth with a distinct orange, black and white colour pattern was found sucking up fluids from Plecoptera (stonefly) exuviae on rocks, surrounded by water, on a river bank in Thailand. During this process, known as puddling, the sesiid ejected brown liquid, indicating that it was not imbibing water alone. The behaviour was documented via video recording. Morphological and DNA analyses indicate that the moth is a new genus and species of the tribe Osminiini and it is described herein as Aurantiosphecia piotrii genus et species nova. Two species of Aschistophleps Hampson, 1893 have been transferred to the newly established genus. The barcode sequence of the cytochrome c oxidase I gene was obtained with universal invertebrate primers after two sets of standard Lepidoptera primers failed to generate a product. Sections on behaviour, conditions of occurrence and possible mimicry models are included. The unique colouration and body posture of A. piotrii suggest that it is a braconid wasp mimic, with the mimicry model potentially also being the sesiid's parasitoid.

The Apollo butterfly, Parnassius apollo (Linnaeus), was common in Europe over 100 years ago, but currently it is considered as near threatened. Different conservation programs have promoted the persistence of this species; however, it is still endangered. An example of such programs was the action devoted to reestablish the Apollo butterfly population in Pieniny National Park (Poland) from only 20-30 individuals which had survived till the last decade of the 20th century. This reintroduction has been successful; however, unexpected developmental problems appeared. Butterflies with deformed or reduced wings became frequent in the population living in the natural habitat, and particularly among those reared under seminatural conditions (in the same environment, but fenced by a net). Until recently, reasons for these malformations remained unknown. However, reports published during last months indicated that there are genetic, biochemical, and microbiological factors contributing to this phenomenon. In the malformed individuals, lesions in the wingless gene and dysfunctions of laccase 1 and 2 were found to be significantly more frequent than in normal insects. A large fraction of butterflies with deformed or reduced wings was devoid of the prokaryotic symbiont Wolbachia, which was present in most normal individuals. Moreover, Yersinia pseudotuberculosis (Pfeiffer) Smith and Thal, and Serratia sp., bacteria pathogenic to insects, were detected in the biological material from both normal and malformed butterflies from this population. These findings are summarized and discussed in this review, in the light of conservation of insects and restitution of their populations from a low number of individuals., (© 2017 Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.)