Phylogeny and the colourful history of jewel bugs (Insecta: Hemiptera: Scutelleridae)

Abstract

Members of the family Scutelleridae (Heteroptera: Pentatomomorpha: Pentatomoidea) are also called shield bugs because of the greatly enlarged scutellum, or jewel bugs because of the brilliant colours of many species. All scutellerids are phytophagous, feeding on various parts of their host plants. Due to lack of obvious synapomorphies and the failure to apply rigorous phylogenetic methods, the higher classification of Scutelleridae has been disputed for more than 150 years. Here we reconstructed a phylogeny of Scutelleridae based on complete sequences of 18S and 28S nuclear rDNAs and all 13 protein-coding genes of the mitochondrial genome, with the sampled taxa covering all of the currently recognized subfamilies. The monophyly of Scutelleridae was confirmed by the congruence of the results of analyses conducted using Bayesian inference, maximum likelihood and maximum parsimony. The phylogenetic relationships among subfamilies were well resolved for the first time. Furthermore, timedivergence studies estimated that the time of origin of Scutelleridae was in the Early Cretaceous (142.1-122.8 Ma), after the origin of the angiosperms. The diversification between the extant subfamilies of Scutelleridae and within the subfamilies occurred from the late Palaeocene to the late Miocene, simultaneously with the rise of the major groups of angiosperms and other phytophagous insects.

Comparative Mitogenomics and Phylogenetic Analyses of Pentatomoidea (Hemiptera: Heteroptera)

“…The eight major families of Pentatomoidea formed four sister groups: (Acanthosomatidae + Urostylididae), (Tessaratomidae + Dinidoridae), (Cydnidae + Scutelleridae) and (Plataspidae + Pentatomidae), but support values in ML analyses of the latter two were relatively low (i.e., <70). Comparable to many previous phylogenetic studies [7,10,13,14], the clade involving Urostylididae was found to be the earliest branching lineage. The sister groups of (Cydnidae + Scutelleridae) and (Plataspidae + Pentatomidae) were also recovered by Zhao et al [10] and Liu et al [9] using mitochondrial sequences, respectively, but with relatively limited sampling and low support.…”

The complete mitochondrial genome of Pentatoma rufipes (Hemiptera, Pentatomidae) and its phylogenetic implications

“…With the development of next-generation sequencing (NGS), an increasing number of pentatomoid mitogenome sequences have been obtained, which provide the possibility of resolving the phylogenetic relationships among the superfamily at the genetic level (Yuan et al 2015b;Bai et al 2018;Zhao et al 2018). Furthermore, Wu et al (2017) confirmed the monophyly of Scutelleridae (based on 18S + 28S rDNAs + 13PCGs), and Liu et al (2019) reconstructed the phylogeny of Pentatomomorpha and Pentatomoidea based on PCGRNA and PCG12R-NA. However, despite the abundance of species in the superfamily, only 97 species have complete or nearly complete mitogenomes published in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2020.07); these represent only eight families.…”

Complete Mitochondrial Genome of Dinorhynchus dybowskyi (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae: Asopinae) and Phylogenetic Analysis of Pentatomomorpha Species

“…However, some are predatory and usually used as biological control agents, such as the Asopinae species (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) ( Panizzi et al 2000 , De Clercq et al 2003 , Castro et al 2015 ). Studies on the phylogenetic relationships within Pentatomomorpha and Pentatomoidea have used morphological characters ( Gapud 1991 ), mitochondrial genomic data ( Hua et al 2008 , Yuan et al 2015b , Wu et al 2017 ), nuclear ribosomal RNA ( Lis et al 2017 ), or a combination of all the data ( Grazia et al 2008 ).…”