Researchers from Karlsruhe's Natural History Museum found the 3-millimeter-long (0.118 inch) insect in the Amazon rainforest in 2007, and hope it will shed light on the early evolution of ants.

"It's by far the most spectacular find of my 26-year career," said museum biologist Manfred Verhaagh on Tuesday.

Scientists from Karlsruhe originally found an unidentified species of ant of a similar type in the Brazilian rainforest in 2003. However, due to an accident in the laboratory, the insect dried up, making further research impossible, Verhaagh said.

Last year a separate team from the museum's research body was in the forest investigating fungus when they stumbled upon the tiny insect, and named it "Martialis heureka".

Normally, the spiders are competitors and enemies, and work individually on their own orb-shaped webs. But entomologists say that bountiful insect hatches caused by heavy rainfall have provided so much food that the spiders instinctively repressed their traditional enmities in favor of cooperation. It's a population-level evolutionary behavior that's never before been witnessed (and thank goodness for that; spiders are scary enough on their own!)

The web, first reported earlier in the summer, took more than a month to build; it's been blown down three times by wind and rain, and re-spun each time. Visitors describe the web as something out of science fiction.

Said a park volunteer, "Hollywood couldn't have done as good a job in their best day as nature has done with this."

Lead researcher Professor Leslie Vosshall said: "Insects are especially sensitive to carbon dioxide, using it to track food sources and assess their surrounding environment.

"The neurons in insects that respond to carbon dioxide were already known, but the molecular mechanism by which these neurons sense this gas was a mystery.

"Though we don't know what other proteins might be involved in the signalling pathway, the identification of the carbon dioxide receptor provides a potential target for the design of inhibitors that would act as an insect repellent.

"These inhibitors would help fight global infectious disease by reducing the attraction of blood-feeding insects to humans."

Dr Simon Hay, an expert in malaria at the University of Oxford, said: "Curiously, the work could also open the opportunity for the development of attractants, used to lure mosquitoes away from humans."

Thousands of football-shaped hornet nests are now dotted all over the forests of Aquitaine, the south-western region of France hugely popular with British tourists.

"Their spread across French territory has been like lightning," said Jean Haxaire, the entomologist who originally identified the new arrival.

He said he had recently seen 85 nests in the 40-odd miles which separate the towns of Marmande and Podensac, in the Lot et Garonne department where the hornets were first spotted.

The hornets can grow to up to 1.8in and, with a wingspan of 3in, are renowned for inflicting a bite which has been compared to a hot nail entering the body.

The report sounds a specific warning for the honeybee, which are vital to U.S. agriculture, pollinating more than 90 commercially grown crops. It can take a massive amount of bees to ensure a crop is suitably pollinated.

For example, it takes about 1.4 million colonies of honeybees to pollinate 550,000 acres of almond trees in California.

U.S. honeybee populations have declined at least 30 percent since the 1980s, when a non-native parasitic mite was introduced.

The committee said that the full extent of the decline is unclear because of problems with the way the federal government collects statistics on the beekeeping industry.

Antibiotic-resistant pathogens and encroachment by Africanized honeybees also are hurting North American honeybee levels, the committee said, and there is clear evidence of a honeybee shortage.

At one site in Barbour County, the nest was as large as a Volkswagen Beetle, said Andy McLean, an Orkin pesticide service manager in Dothan who helped remove it from an abandoned barn about a month ago.

"It was one of the largest ones we've seen," McLean said.

Attached to two walls and under the slab, the nest had to be removed in sections, McLean said.

Entomologist Dr. Charles Ray at the Alabama Cooperative Extension System in Auburn said he's aware of about 16 of what he described as "super-sized" nests in south Alabama.

Ray said he's seen 10 of them and cautioned people about going near them because of the yellow jacket's painful sting.

The ants are named after their characteristically long jaws, which they use to hurl unfamiliar neighbours from their nests, cripple prey, or deliver a brutal bite to anything they consider a threat.

Employing the same high-speed imaging methods as those used to film flying bullets, an American research team now shows that the jaws can move at exceptional speeds. Peak velocities exceed 180km/h (110mph)

"This is really by far and away the fastest recorded animal limb movement," said lead researcher Sheila Patek, of the University of California, Berkeley, who worked with ants from Costa Rica.

"The ants' jaws are relatively short, but they deliver such a powerful bite because they can accelerate so quickly. It's simple physics."

So what was it last Friday that turned the radar in the La Crosse area into a sea of white?

It turns out that it was a gigantic hatch of mayflies.

The bugs were so thick that they showed up as a rainstorm of mayflies on National Weather Service radar.

For about 1 1/2 hours starting at 9 p.m., the insects drifted north, with the radar showing them blanketing areas along the Mississippi River.

"They were dive-bombing in the root beer floats," said Gary Rudy, owner of Rudy's Drive-In, whose family has been slinging burgers and soft drinks since 1966.

Puss moth caterpillars can pose a genuine health hazard. Intense, throbbing pain develops immediately or within five minutes of contact with the caterpillar. Stings on the arm may also result in pain in the axillary (armpit) region. Erythematous (blood-colored) spots may appear at the site of the sting. Other symptoms can include headaches, nausea, vomiting, intense abdominal distress, lymphadenopathy, lymphadenitis, and sometimes shock or respiratory stress. Pain usually subsides within an hour and spots disappear in a day or so -- however, with a larger dose of the venom, it is not uncommon for the symptoms to last up to 5 days.

The most frequently reported caterpillar envenomation in Central Texas is by the puss caterpillar or "asp," Megalopyge opercularis. This caterpillar is described by patients and physicians as inflicting intense radiating pain. The intensity of symptoms may be underestimated leading to undertreatment. Adequate treatment protocols have been lacking and those in use are not very successful.