Parasphaeria boleiriana
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| Parasphaeria boleiriana | ||||||||||||
| Grandcolas & Pellens , 2002 |
Parasphaeria boleiriana is a species of South American cockroach .
features
These are medium-sized animals (length of the female about 2 cm) with only slightly flattened, rather oval rounded body. The males are noticeably smaller than the females and fully winged, the wings of the females are shortened and do not reach the end of the abdomen. The pronotum of the male is oval, that of the female is rounded and triangular. The youth stages ( nymphs ) correspond to the adults in the body shape, they are colored brown. The adult females are black with yellow legs, and the front edge of the wings, the mouthparts and a pair of spots on the abdomen are yellowish. Males are yellowish with translucent wings, with a brown mark on the disc of the pronotum.
Habitat and way of life
The species lives in forests on the Atlantic coast of South America, in the south of Brazil. The evergreen forests with a pronounced dry season have been cleared for agriculture in large sections, but have been preserved as forest islands, especially in protected areas. Parasphaeria boleiriana was found in many of these forests and appears to be widespread here. The animals live in the interior of partially decomposed and therefore soft dead wood, which is also their exclusive nutritional basis. Inside lying branches or tree trunks they form small colonies of rarely more than 15 (max. 78) animals, which consist of a sexually mature female and her offspring. Unlike other wood-dwelling cockroaches and termites , there are no associations of males, females and the offspring. The animals eat corridors the width of their bodies into the wood, about half of which is filled with faeces. Features of more advanced social life, such as B. mutual feeding ( trophallaxis ), were not observed. Similar to termites and other wood-dwelling cockroaches (e.g. of the genus Cryptocercus ), symbiotic unicellular organisms ( flagellates ) live in the rectum of the animals , which enable the wood to be digested.
meaning
Since it has been largely established that termites descend from (sub) social, wood-dwelling cockroaches, these cockroaches have been of interest to evolutionary biologists as model organisms for the emergence of eusocial insect states. For many decades, the genus Cryptocercus (family Cryptocercidae ), which is considered to be the sister group of termites, has been considered in particular . In Parasphaeria boleiriana , the wood-dwelling way of life evidently emerged convergent . There are parallels and differences. Paraspaeria also has symbiotic flagellates in the intestine, but different from Cryptocercus and the termites (which they have in common). In Parasphaeria , the offspring live together, but without real social interactions between them (such as mutual feeding). This supports a controversial theory on the origin of states among termites, which assumes that coexistence primarily resulted from the animals having their food resource (wood) available in such large quantities that there was no direct competition between them is. Social interactions or brood care would therefore have developed later in these aggregations. This is an essential difference to the current model for emergence among the social hymenoptera.
swell
- Philippe Grandcolas & Roseli Pellens (2002): A New Species of the Cockroach Genus Parasphaeria (Dictyoptera: Blattaria: Blaberidae) from the Atlantic Forest in Brazil. Transactions of the American Entomological Society Vol. 128, No. 1: 23-30.
- R. Pellens, P. Grandcolas, and I. Domingos da Silva-Neto (2002): A new and independently evolved case of xylophagy and the presence of intestinal flagellates in the cockroach Parasphaeria boleiriana (Dictyoptera, Blaberidae, Zetoborinae) from the remnants of the Brazilian Atlantic forest. Canadian Journal of Zoology 80: (2) 350-359, doi : 10.1139 / z01-230 .
- Klaus-Dieter Klass, Christine Nalepa, Nathan Lo (2008): Wood-feeding cockroaches as models for termite evolution (Insecta: Dictyoptera): Cryptocercus vs. Parasphaeria boleiriana. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution Volume 46, Issue 3: 809-817. doi : 10.1016 / j.ympev.2007.11.028 .
- G. Brugerolle, ID Silva-Neto, R. Pellens, P. Grandcolas (2003): Electron microscopic identification of the intestinal protozoan flagellates of the xylophagous cockroach Parasphaeria boleiriana from Brazil. Parasitology Research 90: 249-256. doi : 10.1007 / s00436-003-0832-7 .
- Judith Korb (2008): Termites, hemimetabolous diploid white ants? Frontiers in Zoology 5:15 doi : 10.1186 / 1742-9994-5-15 (open access).
Individual evidence
- ^ Judith Korb & Michael Lenz (2004): Reproductive decision-making in the termite, Cryptotermes secundus (Kalotermitidae), under variable food conditions. Behavioral Ecology 15 (3): 390-395. doi : 10.1093 / beheco / arh033
- ^ Judith Korb (2007): The ecology of social evolution in termites. Chapter 7 in: J.Korb & J.Heinze (editors): Ecology of social evolution. Berlin / Heidelberg (Springer)
- ↑ Roseli Pellens, Cyrille A. D'Haese, Xavier Bellés, Maria-Dolors Piulachs, Frédéric Legendre, Ward C. Wheeler, Philippe Grandcolas (2007): The evolutionary transition from subsocial to eusocial behavior in Dictyoptera: Phylogenetic evidence for modification of the “Shift-in-dependent-care” hypothesis with a new subsocial cockroach. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 43: 616-626. doi : 10.1016 / j.ympev.2006.12.017