Intake of Plant Resin Through the Genitalia of Two Asian Assassin Bugs (Reduviidae: Harpactorinae: Harpactorini)
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Intake of Plant Resin Through the Genitalia of Two Asian Assassin Bugs (Reduviidae: Harpactorinae: Harpactorini) Tatsunori Takeda & Daisuke Sakata & Yukihiro Nishikawa & Takafumi Mizuno & Toshiharu Akino
Received: 2 April 2020 / Revised: 6 August 2020 / Accepted: 30 September 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Many insects use tactics to protect their eggs from predation, infection, and water loss, among other risks. Some assassin bugs only in the New World tribe Apiomerini are known to use plant substances, such as resin, instead of secretions to protect their eggs. Here, we report a novel storage mechanism and the utilization of plant resin for egg protection in Asian assassin bugs, Velinus nodipes and Agriosphodrus dohrni (tribe: Harpactorini). Adult females of both species were observed to take in plant resin through their genitalia. We reported on the handling of resin by these species and confirmed that A. dohrni adult females stored resin in their subrectal glands and that the substance covering their egg masses was derived from plant resin. This is the first report on the storage of plant resin inside the bodies of assassin bugs and on resin-protected eggs in
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10905-020-09757-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. T. Takeda : D. Sakata : T. Mizuno : T. Akino Applied Entomology Laboratory, Department of Applied Entomology, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Kyoto, Japan Y. Nishikawa Laboratory of Polymer Mechanics, Department of Macromolecular Science and Engineering, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Kyoto, Japan T. Mizuno (*) CAS Key Laboratory of Tropical Forest Ecology, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, Yunnan Province, China e-mail: [email protected]
Harpactorini. Such internal resin storage was not accompanied by external morphological features, as observed in some Apiomerini assassin bugs, thereby suggesting that this tactic has been overlooked and may have evolved in broader tribes of assassin bugs than previously thought. Keywords Egg-protecting tactics . body storage of resin . subrectal gland . Velinus nodipes . Agriosphodrus dohrni
Introduction Some insect species, such as eusocial insects and some shield bugs, water bugs, and earwigs, directly and devotedly tend to and protect their eggs (i.e., show parental care, Vancassel 1984; Tallamy and Wood 1986; Tallamy 2001; Hanelová and Vilímová 2013). Although many other insects abandon their eggs without direct care, they protect their eggs by selecting suitable oviposition sites (Růžička 2001; Randlkofer et al. 2007; Sadek et al. 2010), applying defensive chemicals to them (Blum and Hilker 2008), encasing them in hardened structures (i.e., oothecae, Grimaldi and Engel 2005), and covering them with feces (e.g., chrysomelid beetles, Damman and Cappuccino 1991) and scales (e.g., lepidopteran species, Floater 1998). Such egg protecti
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