Insects are organic chemists without equal among the terrestrial metazoa. Chemicals used by insects may be acquired by de novo synthesis (autogenously), or exogenously by dietary sequestration of secondary compounds from plants, insect prey, or parental transfer; they may even be appropriated from endosymbionts. Not surprisingly, insect defensive chemical ecology is a field of both great breadth and depth, and its study incorporates anatomy, ethology, physiology, development, phylogeny, and predator-prey and plant-insect ecology, and has been the focus of several extensive review articles. The biosynthetic pathways by which many insects come to possess their vast chemical inventory are increasingly well known, and many powerful experimental tools and techniques are available for analyzing compounds and their synthesis, such as gas chromatography, HPLC, NMR, mass spectroscopy, PCR, and radioisotope label tracking.
The manner in which insects present their defensive compounds is also...
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Stocks, I. (2008). Reflex Bleeding (Autohemorrhage). In: Capinera, J.L. (eds) Encyclopedia of Entomology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6359-6_3331
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