Ant-loving leaf beetles

Leaf beetles comprise about 40,000 described species. We should anticipate that over their long evolutionary history and great species diversity, leaf beetles have evolved many unusual traits. Thus, it is not so surprising the some leaf beetles may not eat leaves at all. One subfamily clade, the Cryptocephalinae (crypto=hidden, ceph=head), contains some members that live with ants and are possibly eating ants. In our new paper, published today in ZooKeys http://zookeys.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=6098, my coauthors Federico Agrain (Argentina), Lourdes Chamorro and Matt Buffington (USDA), and I report that there are 34 species of cryptocephalines that live with ants, mainly formicine and myrmecine ants. Our synthesis, review and proposal of some hypotheses establish a new program for research about this unusual evolutionary step in leaf beetles. I became fascinated with cryptocephalines because of the fecal-case architecture constructed by larvae. I am uncertain where research about this new behavior, living with ants, will take me and colleagues, but I can anticipate that it will be interesting and will reveal more new insights about leaf beetles.

My friend Ainsley sketched me as a camptosomate larva, when we shared the lab at UC-Berkeley. — My friend, Ainsley Seago, sketched me as a camptosomate larva, when we shared the lab at UC-Berkeley.

Camptosomate larvae use the cases their moms built like a protection that they carry and expand as they grow (plate of Chris Brown for our 2008 paper, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1096-3642.2007.00343.x/abstract). — Camptosomate larvae use the cases their moms built like a protection that they carry and expand as they grow (plate of Chris Brown for our 2008 paper,http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1096-3642.2007.00343.x/abstract).

Read more: http://blog.pensoft.net/2016/04/07/rediscovering-an-interesting-group-of-ant-loving-beetles/