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Dickinson (2005) has a good review of insect flight, including behavior, biomechanics, electrophysiology, and neural control with links to more of the primary literature. What follows is a general summary thereof. The jagged trajectories you mention are called saccades in the insect flight literature. In Drosophila, saccades are ~90° turns accomplished in ...

There will always be a tradeoff in terms of resource allocation between reproduction and self maintenance. Since worker ants forego reproduction to perform other roles (gathering resources, caring for young etc.) within the colony, it makes sense that this would favour a longer lifespan. This idea works for most animals (i.e. higher reproduction = lower ...

Quick search - Some articles that may interest you: 1) Random walk model of insect movements Kareiva P. M., Shigesada N. (1983). Analyzing insect movement as a correlated random walk. Oecologia 56(2-3) 234-238 2) Artificial life model of flying insects and its comparison to real insects navigation strategies. Dale K., Collett T. C. (2001). Using ...

Almberg ES, Mech LD, Smith DW, Sheldon JW, Crabtree RL (2009) A Serological Survey of Infectious Disease in Yellowstone National Park’s Canid Community. PLoS ONE 4(9): e7042. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007042 The authors found that the majority of Yellowstone wolves had been exposed to a number of different viruses (evidence from antibodies in blood ...