SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Treehopper Camouflage Derives From Ancestral Wing
from ScienceNOW Daily
News
Treehoppers are masters of
mimicry. On their backs, these
small, odd-shaped relatives of
cicadas sport outgrowths called
helmets, which resemble seeds,
thorns, caterpillar poop, and even
ants. Developmental biologists have
now traced the origin and evolution
of helmets, showing that treehoppers
have achieved what no other insect
has in more than 300 million years:
a third set of wings, which are
deeply modified to form the
helmet.
"This is a beautiful example of
how evolution works, creating
novelty by modifying existing
developmental programs," says
Michalis Averof, an evolutionary
developmental biologist at the
Institute of Molecular Biology and
Biotechnology in Heraklion, Greece,
who wasn't involved in the
research.
Helmets extend from just behind
the head on the first segment of the
thorax, the middle part of the
insect body. Entomologists have long
thought that the helmet is a folded
extension of the thorax's
exoskeleton, its hard outer skin.
Like wings, helmets have veins,
which prompted one researcher in the
1950s to suggest that the helmet was
a modified wing. But entomologists
dismissed his ideas as
inconclusive....
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