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Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect

Behavior of extinct organisms can be inferred only indirectly, but occasionally rare fossils document particular behaviors directly. Brood care, a remarkable behavior promoting the survival of the next generation, has evolved independently numerous times among animals including insects. However, fos...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Wang, Bo, Xia, Fangyuan, Wappler, Torsten, Simon, Ewa, Zhang, Haichun, Jarzembowski, Edmund A, Szwedo, Jacek
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4378507/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25824055
http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05447
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author Wang, Bo
Xia, Fangyuan
Wappler, Torsten
Simon, Ewa
Zhang, Haichun
Jarzembowski, Edmund A
Szwedo, Jacek
author_facet Wang, Bo
Xia, Fangyuan
Wappler, Torsten
Simon, Ewa
Zhang, Haichun
Jarzembowski, Edmund A
Szwedo, Jacek
author_sort Wang, Bo
collection PubMed
description Behavior of extinct organisms can be inferred only indirectly, but occasionally rare fossils document particular behaviors directly. Brood care, a remarkable behavior promoting the survival of the next generation, has evolved independently numerous times among animals including insects. However, fossil evidence of such a complex behavior is exceptionally scarce. Here, we report an ensign scale insect (Hemiptera: Ortheziidae), Wathondara kotejai gen. et sp. nov., from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber, which preserves eggs within a wax ovisac, and several freshly hatched nymphs. The new fossil is the only Mesozoic record of an adult female scale insect. More importantly, our finding represents the earliest unequivocal direct evidence of brood care in the insect fossil record and demonstrates a remarkably conserved egg-brooding reproductive strategy within scale insects in stasis for nearly 100 million years. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05447.001
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spelling pubmed-43785072015-04-01 Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect Wang, Bo Xia, Fangyuan Wappler, Torsten Simon, Ewa Zhang, Haichun Jarzembowski, Edmund A Szwedo, Jacek eLife Ecology Behavior of extinct organisms can be inferred only indirectly, but occasionally rare fossils document particular behaviors directly. Brood care, a remarkable behavior promoting the survival of the next generation, has evolved independently numerous times among animals including insects. However, fossil evidence of such a complex behavior is exceptionally scarce. Here, we report an ensign scale insect (Hemiptera: Ortheziidae), Wathondara kotejai gen. et sp. nov., from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber, which preserves eggs within a wax ovisac, and several freshly hatched nymphs. The new fossil is the only Mesozoic record of an adult female scale insect. More importantly, our finding represents the earliest unequivocal direct evidence of brood care in the insect fossil record and demonstrates a remarkably conserved egg-brooding reproductive strategy within scale insects in stasis for nearly 100 million years. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05447.001 eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd 2015-03-31 /pmc/articles/PMC4378507/ /pubmed/25824055 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05447 Text en © 2015, Wang et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Ecology
Wang, Bo
Xia, Fangyuan
Wappler, Torsten
Simon, Ewa
Zhang, Haichun
Jarzembowski, Edmund A
Szwedo, Jacek
Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect
title Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect
title_full Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect
title_fullStr Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect
title_full_unstemmed Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect
title_short Brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect
title_sort brood care in a 100-million-year-old scale insect
topic Ecology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4378507/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25824055
http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05447
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