What is it?

[svalley]

This strange looking insect showed up in one of our insect surveys down near Roseburg. It is an exotic (non-native). This is the female. It is about 4-5 mm long. The male looks completely different. I will try and post a shot of it tomorrow.



Shot with an Infinity Optics KF2 Long Distance Microscope w/CF4 objective,
Canon 40D, (Visionary Digital Imaging System)

[Franz Neidl]

Hallo Steve,

congatulations for this wonderful picture! Your animal is looking (see the long legs and the end of the body) like a kind of flea. But maybe I am completely wrong...

Franz

[Planapo]

Hi Steve, and welcome back!

Now, I think to make it harder, you didn't stretch the thing on purpose, to keep the mouthparts concealed, huh!?

Judging from the head, to me it looks like Hemiptera: O. Auchenorrhyncha. Some of them which dig in the soil can have such deviant legs.
If that's not it, my second bid would be O. Saltatoria (Orthoptera).

--Betty

[Harold Gough]

I think Franz is right. It is a flea.

As you refer to male and female, it is adult and wingless, which exludes any Hemiptera I know of.

Harold

[Aynia]

Urggghhh... I hate fleas... I come up in big lumps! Great pic though.

[svalley]

This is a male of the "mystery bug" I posted yesterday. It is about half the size of the female.



Shot with an Infinity Optics KF2 Long Distance Microscope w/CF4 objective,
Canon 40D, (Visionary Digital Imaging System)

The species is Caliscelis bonellii, a Homopteran, so it is a plant sucker related to leaf hoppers. The male has flattened paddles on the front femur and tibia that he waves in front of the females before mating. Not a lot is known about them, but a related species constructs a chamber from clay pellets that the eggs are laid in. I don't know if it is the male or female that builds the egg chamber.

[rjlittlefield]

"showed up...near Roseburg...exotic...non-native...not a lot known about them..."

This sounds a bit scary. What's the story?

--Rik

[Planapo]

Harold Gough wrote:

It is a flea.

No, in Siphonaptera, if they have eyes at all, they are secondarily reduced and do not look "compound" anymore.

For those, like some of the colleagues here aboard, more interested in current systematics:
According to modern systematics the "Homoptera" are regarded non-monophyletic, and thus this taxon is not valid anymore in a modern phylogenetic system.
The animal photographed and shown by Steve here, of which we have been given the genus now, Caliscelis, is today placed within the Hemiptera: Auchenorrhyncha, as I had presumed and already stated above. End of story (for the present).

(Where's my prize? Seems I haven't even got an honourable mention!:smt022 )

See e.g.: http://bugguide.net/node/view/15673/tree

--Betty

[svalley]

Betty, you were right. The prize is the pride you will feel, knowing that everyone knows you knew......

Rik, It may have been there for a long time. We had funding for a terrestrial plant pest survey last year and these guys showed up in some sweepnet samples. We do not know if they are a serious pest or even what their host plant is. When we go out and start looking we are almost sure to find new exotics. Sometimes, if they are known pests, alarms go off and sometimes there is funding to find out more.....how wide spread is it?...... is it going to have an economic impact?...... can we do anything about it?

The number of invasive species discovered is going up. Many of them are going to be serious pests and their economic impact is going to be BILLIONS of dollars over the next century. This could very well be as serious as global warming. The global economy is spreading these organisms around the globe and it will have dire consequences for global food and fiber production.