Biologists discover new insect species

Although its name sounds legendary, the newly discovered insect Neuroterus (noo-ROH’-teh-rus) valhalla does not see or act in its role. It is only 1 millimeter long and spends 11 months of the year trapped in the basement.

There is a notable distinction that N. valhalla is the first insect species to be described alongside a fully sequenced genome, which was discovered by researchers at Rice University in Houston’s historic 2021. We are preparing to see how the small stinging bees were affected by February. Freezing.

N. valhalla appears in a paper published this month. Systematic entomology.. Its name is a homage to the place where it was discovered: just outside the Rice graduate student pub Valhalla.

“It would have been a missed opportunity to call it related to Rice or Valhalla,” said graduate student Pedro Brandan Diaz, the lead author of the paper. Campus bar in the spring of 2018.

Brazilian Brandão had never seen an oak tree before visiting Rice as an undergraduate researcher in the laboratory of evolutionary biologist Scott Egan in 2015. Brandão returned to Eagan’s group at graduate school in 2018, and Brandão’s main research focuses on the use of environmental DNA to detect endangered and invasive species, but everyone in the lab is a gall wasp every spring. I am studying insects of the family. Known as gall wasps, these bees are a favorite of Egan’s group because they can be collected from live oak trees that cover the 300-acre campus of Rice. In eight years at Eagan’s Rice, his lab has discovered at least as many new species of gall wasps or predators.

“At Rice, we focus on learning by doing it,” says Eagan. “In my lab, undergraduate and graduate students share some experiential learning processes by studying the biologically diverse ecosystems of living oaks just outside the front door. Armed with patience and magnifying glass, the discoveries are endless. “

N. valhalla and other gall wasps trick the host tree into feeding and protecting their children. Bees lay biochemical cocktails with eggs. The chemicals induce the tree to form crypts or galls around the egg. Galls protect the eggs and feed the larvae that hatch from them.

There are about 1,000 known species of gall wasps. Some emerge from the spherical brown hump that forms underneath the oak leaves. Others form goals inside the branches, others form goals on the flowers of the tree. It is the place where Brandão first gathered N.valhalla.

“Once it appears, it can only live for three to four days,” Brandan said of a small insect. “They don’t eat. Their sole purpose is to mate and lay eggs.”

One of the reasons why it took almost four years to explain the new species, like many other gallers, is N. Valhalla spawns twice a year. It took some time for N. valhalla to find a place to lay eggs in alternating generations.

Brandão and his labmates first noticed N. valhalla in a large tree outside Valhalla while collecting live oak flowers or catkins in late February and early March 2018. .. Flowers. When DNA testing revealed the two species, researchers scrutinized their catch and noticed some small insects with bright-colored legs.

“They lay eggs on growing catkins,” Brandão said of N. valhalla. “Flowers grow in galls and then appear. It happens in March. But the flowers are one-time only, and by the time they appear, there are no more flowers to lay eggs, so they Needs to lay eggs in another tissue. “

According to Eagan, alternation of generations gallers were often mistaken for new species in the past. Genome testing combined with detailed observations in nature is N. It was important to determine that valhalla is a unique species. Finding where the insects went in their alternative generation took both luck and effort.

Kelly Weinersmith, a part-time assistant professor of bioscience, and a collaborator at the University of Iowa took a lucky break in 2019. Weiner Smith is N. Goals were sampled from live Florida oak species that differ from the rice tree in which valhalla was found. Weinersmith sent a sample of his trip to Florida to Iowa collaborators Andrew Forbes and Annaward. They noticed the emergence of two types of bees from a mysterious gall swelling at the junction of the branches. DNA testing showed that the unknown bee was the missing generation of N. valhalla.

“After they left the flowers, to see where they were going, I provided the bees with a bunch of different tissues from the tree and conducted an experiment to observe them,” says Brandão. I did. The idea was to observe N. valhalla just emerging from the basement of the catkin of rice and catch them in the act of laying eggs in another part of the plant.

Much of the work was left to Camilla Binson of the Rice Department, who lived on the Brown University campus, as COVID-19 restrictions restricted the number of people who could enter the campus labs in early 2020. ..

“We went out together and collected the humps and tissues of the catkin for a behavioral test. Petri dishBut she had to go to the lab every day to see if there were any bugs, “Brandan said. Let’s take a look at the Petri dish with lots of tissue and see where we’re going, “Brandan said.

“This was a COVID period, so I took some of them home, put them in a microscope, and took pictures on my phone,” he said.

The team confirmed the findings of the Petri dish by examining the trees that previously collected N. valhalla. They found both an emergence hole from the old basement and more than 12 goals that still contain the larva N. valhalla.

According to Brandão, the N. valhalla generation, which hatches in live oak catkins, becomes fully formed adults from eggs in a few weeks. The cycle of generations growing in the branches takes 11 months.

“If they come out at the wrong time and there are no flowers around, they can’t lay eggs and they just die,” Brandan said. “They must come out at the exact time of flowering of the tree.”

Trees bloom at different times of the year, and it is not clear how bees coordinate their appearance with flowering. Vinson first raised the question of how N. valhalla would be affected by the February 2021 winter storm. This delayed record low temperatures and fresh oak flowering throughout Houston.

“On the day of the freeze, I asked Pedro,” Is this confusing when it comes out, or even the ability to breed? ” Brandan circulated the question to an international group of gall wasp researchers. Vinson deserves follow-up and decided to work on it for an advanced dissertation. She said it is part of a larger question about how climate change affects special insects like gall wasps.

“Our goal Bee “We live in living oaks, from the southern United States to Mexico,” Binson said. “These environments aren’t used to temperatures like last February, and that kind of environment. Freezing will probably occur more and more frequently with climate change.

“The big question is,’Are these populations at risk or are they able to adapt quickly? Do they have a strategy to harmonize well with the changing climate?” She said. ..