Treehoppers

Thanks to the curators of the Benedict Dybowski Zoological Museum (Lviv National University, Ukraine), zoomable digital images of the Ernst Friedrich Germar Collection are now available online. For a number of years, this historically significant collection was thought to have been destroyed in World War II.

Join the 20th Annual Treehopper Gathering, 1-3 June 2012 (arrive Friday, depart Sunday), Little Orleans Campground, Little Orleans, Maryland. This casual event offers an opportunity to chat and collect with others passionate about treehoppers and related insects.

To register or obtain further information, contact Charles Bartlett. Campsites are somewhat limited, so please register with Charles if you wish to camp with our group. Participants are expected to provide their own tents, food, and camping gear, and to share in the cost of the group campground registration and the group meal provided on Saturday evening.

We are delighted to report that Olivia Evangelista successfully defended her doctoral thesis "Systematics and Phylogenetic Analysis of the Treehopper Subfamily Heteronotinae Goding, 1926 (Hemiptera, Auchenorrhyncha, Membracidae)" on 23 February 2012. Working under the direction of Albino M. Sakakibara (Departamento de Zoologia, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil), Olive investigated phylogenetic relationships within Heteronotinae based on a combination of morphological and molecular data. The latter included six nuclear and mitochondrial markers (28S, H2A, H3, Wg, COI, ND1), which she compiled in Jason Cryan's lab at the New York State Museum, Albany. A major contributor to the Treehoppers website, Olive provided most of our content on the subfamily Heteronotinae. We are thrilled that Dr. Evangelista is part of our Team.

A new article by Miko et al. (2012) provides further morphological evidence rebutting the work of Prud'homme et al. (2011), who suggested that the "pronotal" modifications of treehoppers may arise from fused appendages of the prothorax, serially homologous with the wings of the meso- and metathorax. The new paper, which includes an interactive image depicting the anatomy of the treehopper pronotum, concurs with Yoshizawa (2011) in concluding that the prothoracic superstructure in treehoppers does not correspond to a pair of fused wings, but represents the entire prothorax, except the forelegs.