The walking-stick insects, Ramulus mikado, are outbreaks in several mountainous areas from 2020 to 2022. In recent, some population of the insect are showed rapidly decline in their abundance, while some of them are still maintained high population density. In worldwide, insects belonging to Phasmida are reported to outbreak in their habitats as mentioned above environments, but knowledge about outbreak pattern of the walking-stick insects is still lacking. In this study, we aimed which biological and environmental factors are related to wax and wane of the insect population. From 2022 to 2023, we studied host tree preferences in natural conditions, ecological stoichiometry in major host trees, overwintering ecology of R. mikado eggs, and infection rate by entomophathogenic fungi during growing season.

Hydrolyzed proteins have an advantage over intact proteins in terms of their rate of digestion and absorption. The high-pressure enzymatic extraction (HPE) method has been shown to improve the quality characteristics of hydrolysates from Protaetia brevitarsis seulensis (Kolbe) larvae (PBSL). This study investigated the effects of the HPE treatment period, a key candidate factor, on the quality characteristics of PBSL HPE hydrolysates. The hydrolysates were prepared by HPE for 0, 12, 18, 24, 30, and 36 h under optimized conditions—solid:solvent ratio (1:14 [w/v]), using complex proteases (Alcalase:Flavorzyme:Bromelain = 1:1:1, 4%), treatment temperature (50oC), and pressure level (100 MPa). All quality characteristics tended to be superior with longer HPE treatment periods, most of which had the highest values at 30 h, with no significant difference or a slight decrease after that. The quality characteristics of the PBSL HPE hydrolysates were improved by 1.3-1.7 times under conditions of optimal HPE treatment period.

Corporate reputation – the central antecedent of trust – bears the potential to create sustainable competitive advantage. However, far too many examples of companies’ socially irresponsible behavior over the past years led to a severe crisis of confidence. Disgraced companies suffer from the adverse effects of their misbehaviors at all levels. As a consequence, one of the top priorities for both practitioners and business scholars is the identification of opportunities to (re)build corporate reputation. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), a key driver of reputation perceptions, is a very promising one. However, as CSR is a multidimensional construct that comprises a wide range of activities, the selection of the “right” ones deems a major challenge. Based on a literature review, we advocate that news media data should be utilized to analyze which CSR dimensions are particularly likely to affect reputation perceptions. As journalists rely on companies’ press releases as a starting point for their business articles, companies need to carefully evaluate which CSR dimensions they emphasize in their communication strategy. Based on superior measures of reputation and CSR, this study utilizes reputation and news media coverage data on companies listed in the German DAX30 between 2005 and 2011. The panel data regression encompasses the multidimensional concept of CSR, presenting a six-dimensional CSR construct including environment, employee relations, community, product issues, corporate culture and corporate governance. Relevant moderating variables, namely firm and stakeholder characteristics, are investigated. In this context, the results show that the relevance of each of those six distinct dimensions differs for the formation of reputation judgements and varies across investigated stakeholder and company types: across all model specifications, negative media coverage addressing employee relations and community affects reputation perceptions. The general public primarily perceives negative news coverage as relevant for their reputation judgements. Opinion leaders seem to be less dependent on the media to learn about CSR dimensions, as only four out of twelve independent variables exert a significant impact on their reputation judgments. News coverage about product issues only constitutes a key role in the formation of reputation judgements of firms that are predominantly known from direct experiences. A particularly large amount of variation can be explained for reputation ratings of these companies as well as for reputation perceptions of opinion leaders.