Assassin bug¹（猎蝽）, so named because these insects lie in ambush² for prey³ that they attack with speed and precision, are found all over the world. Nearly 140 species of these bugs⁴ are blood-sucking; because they can bite humans around the mouth, they are also called kissing bugs. All kissing bugs can spread Chagas disease, a neglected tropical disease that imposes an economic burden on society. Surprising, then, that scientists' understanding of the evolutionary⁵ history of assassin bugs is riddled⁶ with difficulty. The data are incomplete. Fossils, which exist for only a few groups of assassin bugs, are young, providing only patchy information on how these bugs evolved.

 

Now entomologists（昆虫学者） at the University of California, Riverside have produced a clearer snapshot of the entire evolutionary history of assassin bugs by integrating molecular⁷, paleontological, behavioral and ecological⁸ data into their analyses. The result of their painstaking⁹ work is a new phylogeny（种系发生） -- the representation of the evolutionary relationships between species -- for assassin bugs. It includes the most number of assassin bugs to date and represents the most number of subfamilies.

 

"We can now zoom¹⁰ in on specific groups within the phylogeny to examine specific aspects of the evolution of that group," said Christiane Weirauch, an associate professor of entomology who reconstructed the assassin bug phylogeny with her Ph.D. graduate student Wei Song Hwang. "Our phylogeny significantly improves our knowledge about relationships within assassin bugs and will guide future research work in understanding how some of the interesting prey specialization behaviors and prey capture techniques have evolved."

 

Study results appeared last month in PLoS ONE.

 

"One significant improvement is the addition of several assassin bug species from the subfamily Reduviinae, the second largest subfamily of assassin bugs," said Hwang, the first author of the research paper. "Previous phylogenies have a very limited representation of Reduviinae, which means the overall interpretation¹¹ of the phylogeny is of limited value."

 

Assassin bugs are estimated to have originated during the Middle Jurassic (~178 million years ago), making them a relatively¹² old group of insects. They diversified¹³ significantly in the Late Cretaceous (~97 million years ago); indeed, nearly 90 percent of the existing species diversity we see today in assassin bugs started to diversify¹⁴ from this time onwards. The cause of this diversification¹⁵ remains¹⁶ unknown.

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