0000000000755874

AUTHOR

Carlo Costa

The complete mitochondrial genome of Bactrocera biguttula (Bezzi) (Diptera: Tephritidae) and phylogenetic relationships with other Dacini

Bactrocera biguttula is an African olive fruit fly that does not attack cultivated olives but rather develops in the fruits of wild species of Olea and Noronhia. The complete mitochondrial genome of an individual specimen was characterized in comparison to other Bactrocera. The phylogenetic relationships of B. biguttula with other Dacini were investigated, with special focus on B. oleae, an agricultural pest known to attack cultivated and wild olives. The sequence had a total length of 15,829 bp, and included the typical features of insect mitogenomes, similarly to the other Bactrocera analysed. Start codons included ATG, ATC, ATT, and TCG (in COI). The majority of stop codons (TAA) were fu…

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Wild olive seed weevil in South Africa, Anchonocranus oleae Marshall (Coleoptera Curculionidae), a rediscovery after a century

The wild olive seed weevil, Anchonocranus oleae Marshall, 1912 was not found after its description and the study of its biology by Silvestri in 1915. Recently, A. oleae larvae were found alive inside the kernels of wild olives (O. europaea subsp. cuspidata) collected from trees between 2009 and 2012 in the Western Cape, South Africa. No weevil larvae were found in cultivated olives collected during the same period. Only two adult weevils emerged from olives collected on the tree and on the ground. Over the sampling period 20 adults were collected directly on wild olive trees at different sites in the Western Cape and one in the Eastern Cape. All adults were shown to be conspecific with the …

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Evaluation of motorway reliability based on the identification of spot speed stochastic processes. The case of A22 motorway, Italy

The evaluation of motorway reliability is a subject of great interest for researchers of traffic engineering. For easy recognizable reasons, this subject is very important in theoretical studies and for applications, e.g. evaluation of capacity and traffic control on motorway. In this paper the different conceptions of reliability in technical and scientific literature are compared with the following definition: reliability of traffic stream, for a time interval T, is “the conditioned probability that level of speed spot process does not decrease during T as far as the section in which limit density is reached, given that the level at instant zero is equal to the average speed corresponding…

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