The pear pest, Cacopsylla jukyungi (Hemiptera: Psyllidae), is one of the most damaging insect to commercial pears in South Korea. In this study, we developed eight microsatellite markers specific to C. jukyungi and genotyped 132 individuals collected from 11 localities throughout South Korea. Populations showed lower observed heterozygosity than expected heterozygosity and slightly or highly positive values of inbreeding coefficients, suggesting that C. jukyungi is subjected to inbreeding. The nationwide expansion of pear orchards and the replacement with a popular new cultivar during the last 50 years, which may have accompanied the spread of C. jukyungi-bearing pear grafts and scions, are likely sources of such facilitated dispersal. Thus, a management strategy against unintended anthropogenic dispersal of the pear psyllid will be required for better control of C. jukyungi.

The fall armyworm (FAW), Spodoptera frugiperda (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), which is native to tropical and subtropical regions of the Western Hemisphere is now annually arrives in Korea. In this study, we developed loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay, one of the main merits of which is a rapid identification of target species. Five among 11 FAW-specific loci tested successfully provided a consistent reaction when ten FAWs, which were collected from eight localities in four countries were tested, whereas the 13 non-target species were not amplified. To increase in-field applicability of the method all life stages, reaction time, and different periods after death was tested using the quick extracted DNA. Our FAW diagnostic protocol can be completed within 30 min, from the process of extracting genomic DNA from an egg or a 1st instar larva to species determination.

Bombyx mandarina (Lepidoptera: Bombycidae), the presumed ancestor of B. mori, has long been a subject of study to illustrate the geographic relationships in connection with origin of B. mori. We report 97 mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) sequences of B. mandarina collected from Korea and Japan. Phylogenetic and population genetic analyses showed that all individuals of B. mandarina collected in Korean localities formed a strong group together with all individuals originated from northern China (mainly north of the Qinling-Huaihe line) and some of southern China. This group was placed as the sister group to B. mori strians suggesting that this group had been served as an immediate progenitor for B. mori.

The body of knowledge from psychology has been useful to marketing for understanding consumer minds and behaviors (Jia et al., 2018). Daily activities, such as movie watching, grocery shopping, online shopping, drinking coffee (with friends or alone), and making an in-app purchases on social media, all involve consumption which is affected by the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of the decision maker (i.e., consumers). But when the ways in which we sense and interact with the world change, how does it shift our ways of communicating with each other and the processes of forming perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors?

The second generation of stars in the globular clusters (GCs) of the Milky Way (MW) exhibit unusually high N, Na, or Al, compared to typical Galactic halo stars at similar metallicities. The halo field stars enhanced with such elements are believed to have originated in disrupted GCs or escaped from existing GCs. We identify such stars in the metallicity range −3.0 < [Fe/H] < 0.0 from a sample of ∼36,800 giant stars observed in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope survey, and present their dynamical properties. The N-rich population (NRP) and N-normal population (NNP) among our giant sample do not exhibit similarities in either in their metallicity distribution function (MDF) or dynamical properties. We find that, even though the MDF of the NRP looks similar to that of the MW’s GCs in the range of [Fe/H] < −1.0, our analysis of the dynamical properties does not indicate similarities between them in the same metallicity range, implying that the escaped members from existing GCs may account for a small fraction of our N-rich stars, or the orbits of the present GCs have been altered by the dynamical friction of the MW. We also find a significant increase in the fraction of N-rich stars in the halo field in the very metal-poor (VMP; [Fe/H] < −2.0) regime, comprising up to ∼20% of the fraction of the N-rich stars below [Fe/H] = −2.5, hinting that partially or fully destroyed VMP GCs may have in some degree contributed to the Galactic halo. A more detailed dynamical analysis of the NRP reveals that our sample of N-rich stars do not share a single common origin. Although a substantial fraction of the N-rich stars seem to originate from the GCs formed in situ, more than 60% of them are not associated with those of typical Galactic populations, but probably have extragalactic origins associated with Gaia Sausage/Enceladus, Sequoia, and Sagittarius dwarf galaxies, as well as with presently unrecognized progenitors.