Bridging the gap between chewing and sucking in the hemipteroid insects: <br />new insights from Cretaceous amber

Abstract

The diversity of feeding apparatuses in insects far exceeds that observed in any other animal group. Consequently, tracking mouthpart innovation in insects is one of the keys toward understanding their diversification. In hemipteroid insects (clade Paraneoptera or Acercaria: lice, thrips, aphids, cicadas, bugs, etc.), the transition from chewing to piercing-and-sucking mouthparts is widely regarded as the turning point that enabled hyperdiversification of the Hemiptera, the fifth largest insect order. However, the transitional process from chewing to piercing-and-sucking in the Paraneoptera was hitherto completely unknown. In this paper, we report a well preserved mid Cretaceous amber fossil of the paraneopteran insect family Archipsyllidae and describe it as Mydiognathus eviohlhoffae gen. et sp. n. This species has elongate mandibles and styliform laciniae similar to Hemiptera but retains functional chewing mouthparts. A number of morphological characters place the Archipsyllidae as the sister group of the thrips plus hemipterans, which strongly suggests that the mouthparts of M. eviohlhoffae represent a transitional condition from primitive chewing to derived piercing-and-sucking mouthparts. The clade composed of Archipsyllidae, thrips, and hemipterans is here named Pancondylognatha, a new supra-ordinal taxon. Based on newly obtained information, we also assess the monophyly of the Paraneoptera, which was called into question by recent phylogenomic analyses. A phylogenetic analysis that includes Mydiognathus strongly supports the monophyly of the Paraneoptera.

Origin and transformation of the in‐flight wing‐coupling structure in Psocodea (Insecta: Paraneoptera)

“…Placement of Pachytroctidae and Liposcelididae was based on Yoshizawa and Johnson (); those families were not sampled in Yoshizawa and Johnson (). The outgroup taxa were based on Friedemann et al () and Yoshizawa and Lienhard (). Unsampled families were trimmed from the tree, and a coded character matrix was reconstructed by the parsimony criterion using Mesquite version 3.04 (Maddison & Maddison, ).…”

“…716–731 (for “Psocoptera”) and “Evolution of Attachment Structures in the Highly Diverse Acercaria (Hexapoda),” by Friedemann et al, , Cladistics, 30, pp. 170–201 and “Bridging the Gap between Chewing and Sucking in the Hemipteroid Insects: New Insights from Cretaceous Amber,” by Yoshizawa and Lienhard, , Zootaxa, 4079, pp. 229–245 (for the relationship with the outgroups)…”

“…(2014) and Yoshizawa and Lienhard (2016). Unsampled families were trimmed from the tree, and a coded character matrix was reconstructed by the parsimony criterion using Mesquite version 3.04 (Maddison & Maddison, 2015).…”

“…We expanded on the previous wing characters surveys that were mostly based on light microscopy by including additional taxa and using SEM to examine structures at higher magnification and resolution. We evaluated wing coupling characters based on the phylogenetic hypotheses presented by Yoshizawa and Johnson (), Friedemann, Spangenberg, Yoshizawa, and Beutel (), and Yoshizawa and Lienhard (). We examined the homology and character state transformations of the wing coupling apparatus.…”

Wing base structure supports Coleorrhyncha + Auchenorrhyncha (Insecta: Hemiptera)

“…Morphological data selected from the forewing base of Peloridium were newly appended to two data matrices created previously: (i) the forewing base character matrix for Paraneoptera, comprising 20 discrete characters, constructed by Yoshizawa and Saigusa (), in which Coleorrhyncha was not examined; (ii) the full morphological data, comprising 119 characters (including the above as characters 20–39) compiled by Friedemann et al. (), with some corrections to character coding as mentioned by Yoshizawa and Lienhard () (Appendix 1). The genus Hackeriella was used in the original full morphological data matrix (Friedemann et al., ) but, because this genus lacks flight ability, almost all wing base characters were previously coded as unknown.…”