A cool paper was just sent to me by a South African biologist friend. Some researchers discovered a new species of cockroach, which is in itself not newsworthy, but this one jumps. In fact, it spends most of its time jumping.
Saltoblatella montistabularis looks and moves quite a bit like an orthopteroid, but the segmentation and general morphology is clearly cockroach-like when you look closely. It jumps by (you guessed it) rapidly extending its flexible hind tibiae. They can make it pretty far- up to 48 times their body length on one jump. There are many ecological reasons that suggest why this developed (tall grass, etc).
But more importantly: Jumping is generally thought of (according to this paper) as having deep evolutionary roots, but not much of this roach's anatomy has been heavily modified. Grasshoppers, springtails and other famous jumpers have very specific, complex and well-developed mechanisms for jumping. This roach uses mechanisms for jumping that are relatively small modifications of existing structures.
A bit of searching through the fossil record turned up evidence that jumping may have evolved a long time ago in blattodea, but not resulted in adaptive radiation.
This begs the question (and has me really curious)- what is this roach's phylogenetic affiliations? Is it part of an ancient and limited lineage? Did jumping develop and disappear throughout Blattoidea over time? Or is this just a roach that recently developed thighs of steel? I'm gong with the first option, but the jury seems to still be out.
Full text of the article with **Really Cool Pictures*** (free access provided by Yale, whatupp):
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/8/3/390.full.pdf+html
No comments:
Post a Comment