Jadera haematoloma
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| Jadera haematoloma | ||||||||||||||
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| Jadera haematoloma (Herrich-Schäffer, 1847) |
Jadera haematoloma, the red-shouldered bug, goldenrain-tree bug or soapberry bug, is a species of true bug that lives in two populations in southern Florida. The more southern of these two populations has colonized a native host soapberry bush, the balloon vine (Cardiospermum corindum). This vine produces berries of a fairly uniform size, which J. haematoloma feeds on by inserting its mouthparts (beak) through the berry's exterior and into the interior seeds. In the mid-1950s, a southeast Asian tree, the flat-podded goldenrain tree (Koelreuteria elegans), was introduced as an ornamental plant, and quickly escaped domestic use and grew wild. Significantly, the goldenrain tree can be colonized by J. haematoloma, though its fruit is smaller and the seeds less deeply embedded than in the balloon vine.
In a seminal paper published in the scientific journal Genetica in 2001, it was shown that evolution that had taken place in this southernmost population of J. haematoloma in a period of only a few decades [1]. They showed that the beak length, which in the ancestral type was about 70% the length of the body, was only about 50% the body length in the insects that had colonized the non-native tree, though the size of the bugs themselves had not changed. In addition, they found that:
...derived bugs mature 25% more rapidly, are 20% more likely to survive, and lay almost twice as many eggs when reared on seeds of the introduced host rather than those of the native host. Fecundity is also twice as great as that of ancestral type bugs reared on either host, while egg mass is 20% smaller.
[edit] References
- ^ Scott P. Carroll, Hugh Dingle, Thomas R. Famula & CharlesW. Fox (2001). Genetic architecture of adaptive differentiation in evolving host races of the soapberry bug, Jadera haematoloma. Genetica 112–113: 257–272.
