Well, we don’t often get a full biology lesson along with our photographs, but we are lucky to have reader Lou Jost, who’s not only a crack photographer and artist, but a naturalist and biologist living and working in Ecuador. I’ve posted about treehoppers before, but Lou has encountered them in the flesh (rather, in the chitin). Here are his photos and a comprehensive update on mebracid biology; his notes are indented:
You’ve written a lot about the weird membracid treehoppers (here, here, here, here, and here). Ever since reading those posts, I’ve wanted to see one of the fancier ones myself. Last week it finally happened! I found a group of membracid treehoppers (Cyphona cf. trifida) eating a rare plant I was growing in my yard (in the eastern Andes of Ecuador). They’re just 7mm long and so darn cute!
Your posts and commenters wondered what function those weird antenna-like back appendages might have. As you mentioned, some definitely mimic ants. Others may mimic insect-eating fungus. Some may just protect the body from predators by acting as a spiny shield.
But recently people found out that these bugs sing through the stems of their host plants, vibrating the stems at frequencies that humans could hear, if the vibration could be mechanically transmitted to the air. People have made such devices and there are now libraries of treehopper songs!! The songs are complex and a given individual can give different calls depending on context: warning calls, male courting songs, female acceptance songs, etc, much like simple birds. Males may even jam the songs of other males. The babies even call for their mother when disturbed by a predator, and the mother comes to the rescue!! Almost certainly they also signal their ant associates using this medium.
This makes me wonder if the weird helmets with their “antennae” may play a role in adjusting the frequencies of sounds emitted, or if they may be resonators to better detect some of these signals. The helmets are completely hollow and only attached at the neck and front legs. One of the commenters in one of your threads made a similar suggestion. (Another comment somewhere suggested that the antennae are actually used to communicate their earthly observations to the Mother Ship.)
Anyway these things are a joy to watch.
Turns out there may another side to the story of insects using plants to transmit their songs. . . Heidi Appel and Rex Cocroft (the latter a specialist in membracid songs) discovered that plants can “hear” insect-generated vibrations (in this case, caterpillars chewing) and increase their production of defensive chemicals in response!! So far, however, Arabidopsis (the plant used in the experiments) did not respond to leafhopper songs, only to caterpillar chewing. But membracids mostly feed on trees and perhaps some tropical trees can hear their songs and respond. Interesting future avenues for study.
Here’s a great video about membracids, set in eastern Ecuador:
The narration was originally in English for Animal Planet but is so banal and ungrammatical I can’t bear to listen to it. I don’t understand French but the narration sounds mysterious and beautiful in that language! Much better than the English version, trust me. But it has some gaps. The English version is here (Rex Cocroft’s bits are good; skip to the 2:00 timeframe.)
Photo notes: The mating pair and the individual clinging to a stem were taken in life (taken with a little Panasonic FZ300 + Raynox close-up lens). The others were of preserved specimens, made by focus-stacking (some involving 600+ stacked images) using an SLR with 90mm, 135mm, or 200mm lenses. In front of these lenses I attached a reversed Nikkor 60mm macro lens or reversed 50mm Nikon enlarger lens which act as highly-corrected close-up lenses.
Fascinating. There is so much to learn about insects.
Unbelievable! As a peasant from our countryside allegedly said after seeing for first time a giraffe at the zoo, such an animal does not exist! And Lou Jost has done a great job.
Thanks! Some of these really are unbelievable even when they are sitting right in front of me.
Cool! Wasn’t expecting a YT when I clicked the link for caterpillar chewing. Hope they put that on their CV’s.
Fascinating and beautiful creatures and great photos of them. Thank you!
Great work, Lou! I agree that these ornaments can be for a variety of roles related to thwarting their natural enemies. I am more convinced now that this could include mimicking the Cordyceps fungi.
Thanks Mark. Yes, several biologists have independently noted the resemblance to Cordyceps, though not in the species I show here.
But if you look at the images that come up in Google for “membracids” or “treehoppers”, the diversity is incredible. It’s clear that there are many different selective forces at work here, and we’re clueless about many of them.
I entertain a view that the whole thing started with pronotums used for camouflage, with different lines exploring camo in different ways (leaf edges, buds, lichens, etc.), b/c the broader group of insects from which they came were already doing that. Then the forms of some pronotums got directed by exaptation into selection for other deceptions b/c they accidentally resembled something else in their environment like ants and maybe the fungi.
Marvelous and fantastic creatures! And technically impressive photography, Lou. 600 slices ?!? Wow!
It’s a thrill to see the final image slowly build up on my computer monitor from individual slices that just look like garbage. Magical!
Well, I recently built an image with three pictures. 🙂
Lou, thank you for posting these photos. I know you went to a lot of effort to make them, and we who “live vicariously in the tropics through the adventures of others” really appreciate it!
Thanks Jim. I know you do more than live it vicariously—I look forward to showing these things to you when you visit us for your research!
Fascinating.
Beautiful photos and interesting biology. Thanks!
Can’t wait to show these to my children. They will be fascinated, as I am. Thank you Lou for taking the time for the explanations and providing the links. Not to mention the sharing the pictures. Insects using plants as musical instruments for communication? How cool is that?
You’re welcome. This thing made me forget about everything else in my life. (What, my reports are late? Sorry, but MEMBRACIDS!)
I had been playing with adding a reversed lens in my kit as well. There is an old post in the photomacrography.net site positing that it is good to stop down the aperture of the reversed lens so that all the light passing thru this lens goes thru the center, which is optically the best part of a lens.
I now control the exposure with the aperture of the reversed lens and leave the main lens wide open, based on the information on the photomacrography.net site.
Especially when a microsceope objective is mounted on a normal lens, closing the aperture of the normal lens does weird things to the image.
Thanks for a fabulous write-up, photos and links, Lou. I’m blown away by the sounds of the treehoppers!
Aren’t they surprising? Some sound like whale songs.
Incredible. Who would have guessed?
I just went to look at them on my tree again. They were going nuts! They were all flying around and dancing on the twigs–rapidly doing what looked like very high push-ups, maybe 10-20/sec. Never saw them do that before. And they fly well, in spite of the daggers on their backs. I always imagined they just used flight as an emergency escape mechanism but they are perfectly at home in the air, flying tight patterns, almost hovering, and landing with precision— very different from leafhoppers.
Acoustic communication is widespread, perhaps nearly universal in auchenorhynch Homoptera [which is to say just about any Homoptera other than the aphid and scale lineages].
Cicadas are well-known, of course, but I’d never imagined that any of the little leafhoppers and planthoppers ‘sang’ until I came across a book on the subject in the department library. This was Frei Ossiannilsson’s 1949 treatise “Insect Drummers: A Study on the Morphology and Function of the Sound Producing Organ of Swedish Homoptera Auchenorrhyncha, with Notes on Their Sound-production”. This study was amazingly low-tech. Ossiannilsson apparently used stethoscope, and rendered hundreds of planthopper calls in musical notation.
Wow! Did he look at any membracids?
Since so many Homoptera are sensitive to sounds of conspecifics, the predatory ones might easily evolve sensitivity to sounds of their prey species as well. When I was learning about this stuff I ran across a statement that predatory homopterans can hear caterpillars chewing from half a meter away.
It’s been over 30 years since I encountered the Ossiannilsson book, so can’t say with certainty. Most, if not all, of his subjects were cicadellids [leafhoppers or sharpshooters], which are extremely diverse in northern Europe. He would probably have looked at membracids if available, but my understanding is that there are as few as 3 species of membracids in Europe, so it’s likely that they are rare or non-existent in Denmark.
My recollection is that most of his work took place during German occupation in WWII, so another reason for his low-tech approach.
Lou — Another postscript — I see that Ossiannilsson [who was Swedish, not Danish] continued to publish on the taxonomy of Homoptera into the 1990s, when he was likely well into his 80s or beyond. One volume of his treatise on Homoptera of Fennoscandia included Membracidae, so I’d guess in his thesis he would have made some effort to study the “music” of at least one exemplar of the family.
Thanks for letting us know about this man and his work. I’ll keep an eye out for his books.
These little critters put humnan microscale technologies to shame.
Thank you very much for these photos & the video. Both photos and subjects are splendid.
Off-topic, but since Ossiannilsson (what an extraordinary name – was he descended from the poet of The Cattle Raid of Cooley?)and his books are mentioned, there has recently been published in Britain a new field guide to British bees in which a friend of mine played a small part. It has been very well-received.
Sorry, physicists, but this story is Exhibit One for why biology is the coolest science ever!
What spectacular photos of a 7mm creature! Thanks for all the fascinating links too, Lou–those membracid songs are addictive! 🙂
Do you have any idea if these guys specialize on your rare plant?
(Speaking of which, I was surprised to find its family listed as Leguminosae on the ICUN page. I thought it had been officially Fabaceae for some time now. Glad to hear it though…they’ll always be legumes to me.)
(…as with the crucifers, umbellifers, composites… 🙄 )
And the phenomenon of plants “hearing” and reacting to certain vibrations is just such an exquisite product of co-evolution!
I’m sure it’s widely known that some chameleons communicate via plant vibrations too. Now I’ll have to do a little searching to see how many other taxa have arrived at this same communication solution.
Hi Diane, I didn’t know that about chameleons. Are those the Anolis chameleons or tho Old World prehensile-handed ones?
The IUCN site is mainly a conservation site interested in easy data access to non-specialists, so they may not be the best authorities on higher taxonomic categories. Zapoteca is a mimosoid, with puffy white and pink fuzzball flowers. Like you, I wondered whether “my” bugs might be specialists on this rare tree (if so, they are probably a new species), but I did read that many tropical membracids are not fussy about their food. In my yard, I have a non-membracid treehopper species feeding on avocado, Monnina (Polygalaceae) and Erythrina (Fabaceae). That’s quite a broad palette.
Old World. I learned about this when I was keeping Rhampholeon brevicaudatus and learning about African chams.
I had a go at Google Scholar and got a lot of hits, so I thought I’d just send you a link to the search itself:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=chameleon+communication+plant+vibration&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C23&as_sdtp=
R. brevicaudatus, as far as I know, either does not use this form of communication or has not yet been studied for it. They do, however, sometimes produce a buzzing vibration to communicate with each other.
( Also, apparently R. brevicaudatus is now Rieppeleon brevicaudatus. Sigh. Must taxonomists go out of their way to change the names of the few binomials I still remember?!)
Oh, I remember those puffy pink fluffball flowers from a mimosa tree we had in the backyard of my childhood home. I thought it was a beautiful, but my Mom called it “messy.” 🙄
Well, too bad Membracids tend to be culinary generalists…
Diane, I just don’t know how specialized they are here. In the temperate zone they are supposed to be quite particular, but one reference said the tropical ones tend to be less specialized (going against the usual trend for tropical things, so I am a bit skeptical…).
I was thinking exactly the same thing re generalists/specialists & temperate/tropical.
Sounds like there’s still hope though. I suppose the rareness of the tree will complicate the research? Thinking of setting up some taste-test trials? 😀
(IIRC you’ve either described and/or found and had someone else describe another new species or two, including at least one that was named after you?)
Yes, I’ve found lots of new species of plants, sixty or seventy, and sometimes other people name them after me. Someone named a genus after me too, but I lost it when molecular phylogenies showed it was embedded in another genus. Darn! In fact I wrote about that plant just this morning on the EcoMinga Foundation blog:
https://ecomingafoundation.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/exploring-the-forests-in-the-sky-our-new-rio-machay-reserve-east-ridge/
I thought I remembered that it was a high number, but not that it was 60 – 70! What a thrill! (Or is it mundane by now? 😉 )
Bummer about the genus, tho.
Now, the first thing I think when I discover a new species is “Oh darn, one more to write up.” I have a large backlog of them laying around my house waiting for me to draw them….There are eight thousand alcohol-filled film canisters of orchid specimens covering my floors! But every new species is still exciting in spite of the work they require.
Lou, have you ever had anything to do with the American Orchid Society?
“Now, the first thing I think when I discover a new species is “Oh darn, one more to write up.” ”
LOL! So, it’s possible to have a first world problem in the third world. 😉 (Though that’s probably not fair to Ecuador.)
Yes, I wrote an article for their magazine years ago, but I work more closely with the regional-level orchid societies in the US, many of whom actively support orchid conservation and raise money for that purpose. Some of our EcoMinga reserves have been funded in part by their donations, and by the Orchid Conservation Alliance.
I should have figured you’d be more familiar with US orchid societies than I am. 😉
And yes, the reason I was asking was because I thought they’d love your articles for their magazine.