Talk:European corn borer

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Peer reviewers: Jerryshen.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:58, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Peer Edit
This article has a lot of good information in it, but I think there are a few places where it could be condensed into larger bodies of text rather than broken up. For example, I would consolidate the description and life cycle descriptions into one section, separated by egg, larva, and adult (in that order as suggested below). Furthermore, check that you have a citation at the end of each section- the spacing of the citations makes it look like some of the info is not cited. I made a few grammatical/syntax changes as well- overall, try reading the article aloud and maybe reconsidering some of punctuation placement- this is mostly just a style suggestion.

Let me know if you have any questions, or if you want me to do a full language/grammar edit!

Emilykh26 (talk) 02:39, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

Quick Suggestions
This is a well written article that contains a lot of detailed information! One small formatting thing that I would suggest is flipping the order of Adult-Larva-Egg to Egg-Larva-Adult in the Description section in order to reflect chronological order. Richywutang2018 (talk) 05:26, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

Behavioral Ecology Peer Edit
This article is extremely strong, clear, and in-depth, with about twenty references. I performed minor changes, such as hyperlinking and editing for grammatical errors and clarity. The Description paragraph should be cited with a source. I found a source detailing what the CLIMEX model does, and added in the citation. I would also make a consistent use of how to refer to the organism throughout the article. If you want to use the acronym ECB aka European corn borer, it should be introduced earlier, perhaps in the lead paragraph and this acronym should be used more than once. The polyandry section is a little confusing, so I went to the actual source. From the paper, it does not actually seem like the European corn borer actually uses the spermatophores in order to increase the genetic diversity of its progeny because it was observed in the study that some females only depleted one spermatophore even though they had two in their bursa. I corrected the article to reflect this. Sarahxyang (talk) 04:52, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Mating with multiple males increases genetic diversity of offspring, regardless of whether or not the female depletes multiple spermatophores. I don't think this changes the fact that polyandry increases genetic diversity beyond monogamy, so the part of the article you mentioned does not support the edit you made. Felderp (talk) 23:18, 5 November 2017 (UTC)

Peer edit
I thought this was a really well written and comprehensive post. It was concise, while still providing the necessary detail. I made a few edits; I added some hyperlinks to less commonly used words and I removed several hyperlinks that didn’t work. In addition, I fixed any grammatical errors that I saw and change a couple of the sentence structures to help it flow better. I thought it was very well written and contained helpful scientific details, especially the polyandry section, which explained the concept very clearly and thoroughly. I was going to split the Description section into a Description and Oviposition section, but saw that there is an Oviposition section later on. It seems that these two sections overlap a lot, so I would suggest deleting the information about oviposition in the Description section and mainly focusing on it in the Oviposition section. Otherwise, I thought this post looked really great! Thanks for posting! Mlopez2121 (talk) 21:04, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Minor Edit
I was assigned this article to review, and found that it was mostly good. I added some more sections under the life cycle section and made small grammar fixes.

Iginsberg (talk) 20:28, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Big Edit
I made extensive changes to the European corn borer page. I added information on the economic impact of ECB to the lead section. I also added an image of the adult moth on a flower. I also added sections on geographic range and the effect of climate change on it, the life cycle and more specifics about eggs and diapause. I added information on ECB mating, specifically voltininsm, polyandry, and sex pheromones and calling behavior. I added two subsections on parental care: ovipostion and male investment. I added sections on host plants and mutualism.

I included a small section called Pest of crop plants that I would like to expand on in the future by adding more information about ECB control using natural pest and Bt toxin. I also would like to discuss the possibility of Bt toxin resistance.

We could elaborate on various behaviors of ECB including aggregation and dispersion, sexual selection and the co-evolution of male and female traits to gain attention, and sex pheromone perception.

Here are some sources I want to use to make these future improvements:

https://dl.sciencesocieties.org/publications/cs/abstracts/35/2/CS0350020550

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/284/5416/965.full

https://academic.oup.com/jee/article-abstract/90/4/905/2216682

https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7007-7-10

http://www.pnas.org/content/84/21/7585.short

http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1603/0046-225X-30.4.700

Also, someone with strong writing skills could fine tune the lead section.

Felderp (talk) 05:06, 25 October 2017 (UTC)


 * I went through all of these sources and added sections on genetic control of (1) pheromone mixture production in females, (2) olfaction in males, and (3) flight response in males. I also added a section on sex selection and the co-evolution of male and female pheromone compositions which theoretically could result in reproductive isolation and speciation. Finally I added a section under biological control on the refuge area recommendation to maintain ECB susceptibility to Bt toxin. Felderp (talk) 05:04, 1 December 2017 (UTC)


 * You all made the lead insanely too technical. The lead should be plain English. Jytdog (talk) 05:11, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

Slight change made
I made a slight change in the third paragraph to more accurately reflect the actual content of the reference given in accordance with NPOV. Changed wording to indicate "may affect" and "further study needed" which is what the reference itself says. Kwagoner (talk) 05:34, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Peer Review
Hi! I thought that this was a great article! It covers a lot of different aspects of the moth, and I thought its mating and pest sections were particularly informative.

I edited some details on one of your sources as the date had incorrect formatting. I also made some minor grammatical fixes throughout the article and changed the tenses of some of the verbs in the male investment section so that they all had the same tense. Additionally, I combined some separate paragraphs, as each of them had only one or two sentences and were relevant to each other. I added a picture of some crop damage caused by the European corn borer in the Pest of crop plants section.

I would add more information to several of the sections though, as some of them are a couple of sentences. Also, I think that there could be more citations used - the description section does not have any citations, and parts of the life cycle could also use more citations. jerryshen (talk) 21:58, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

Peer review
I really like all the photos and detail in your sections. I believe that this is worthy for good/featured article status.

Questions following copy edits

 * Since humans can be many colors, is there something better than "flesh colored"?
 * Changed to beige


 * Where it says "The number of eggs per egg mass decreases each day with the majority of eggs laid before the seventh night", if there are 10 days and it decreases each day, wouldn't the majority be laid by the fifth night?
 * I'm just going to remove this part because I'm not sure. Your logic makes sense though.


 * Instead of "early dark hours of the day", could you say "before dawn"?
 * Yep


 * It remarks "found to have differing sex pheromones", isn't that universal for sex pheromones?
 * I was referring to the different pheromone compositions. Males and females and also between strains E and Z. Let me know what you think of the change.


 * I'd suggest standardizing on "corn" throughout since it's called the "corn borer". On first use, also say "maize" and Zea mays. It could be just as good to standardize on "maize", but mixed use implies there's a difference.
 * Thanks for changing that.


 * Are the E and Z strains italicized (E and Z) in the sources? When I looked at some references they were, but not in others.
 * I'm going to italicize all of them based on this E-Z notation

I'll look again tomorrow and may have other ideas. Keep up the good work. SchreiberBike &#124; ⌨  06:50, 1 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Instead of "A mixture of isomers is much more efficient at producing flight in a particular direction in both the Z and E strain as compared to a single component", could it say "A mixture of isomers is much more efficient in attracting the moth than a single component"?
 * Made the change.
 * Where it says "peppers", is that " peppers "?
 * Yes, I added the link.
 * Hope that helps. SchreiberBike &#124; ⌨   03:23, 2 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your help editing SchreiberBike
 * What do you think about merging the description and life cycle sections SchreiberBike ? Felderp (talk) 21:26, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
 * I think that makes sense. Also much of the material in the paragraph directly under the Life cycle heading could be moved into the sections for each stage. Good move on E-Z notation; maybe that could be linked in the See also section at the bottom.  SchreiberBike &#124; ⌨   22:06, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
 * I've just included the notation wikilink in the text mentioning rather than needing a see also section since the mention is pretty limited. Kingofaces43 (talk) 23:18, 10 December 2017 (UTC)