The ability to fold the wings is an important phenomenon in insect evolution and a feature that attracts the attention of engineers who develop biomimetic technologies. Beetles of the family Ptiliidae (featherwing beetles) are unique among microinsects in their ability to fold their bristled wings under the elytra and unfold them before flight. The folding and unfolding of bristled wings and of the structures involved in these processes varies among ptiliids, but only one species, Acrotrichis sericans, has been analyzed in detail.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIEEE Trans Med Imaging
November 2024
The size of image volumes in connectomics studies now reaches terabyte and often petabyte scales with a great diversity of appearance due to different sample preparation procedures. However, manual annotation of neuronal structures (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMiniaturization is an evolutionary trend observed in many animals. Some arachnid groups, such as spiders and mites, demonstrate a strong tendency toward miniaturization. Some of the most miniaturized spiders belong to the family Anapidae.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArthropod Struct Dev
September 2023
Methods of three-dimensional electron microscopy have been actively developed recently and open up great opportunities for morphological work. This approach is especially useful for studying microinsects, since it is possible to obtain complete series of high-resolution sections of a whole insect. Studies on the genus Megaphragma are especially important, since the unique phenomenon of lysis of most of the neuron nuclei was discovered in species of this genus.
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