Dominguez Eduardo, Abdala Virginia
Instituto de Biodiversidad Neotropical (IBN), UNT-CONICET, Cátedra de Biología Animal, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Tucumán, Argentina.
Instituto de Biodiversidad Neotropical (IBN), UNT-CONICET, Cátedra de Biología General, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Tucumán, Argentina.
J Morphol. 2019 Jan;280(1):95-102. doi: 10.1002/jmor.20920.
Insects were the first animals to take to the skies, and have been flying for over 320 million years. The order Ephemeroptera is, or at least is part of, the most early-diverging lineage of extant winged insects. The extant species present a very short adult life span, mainly dedicated to reproduction and dispersal of eggs. Mating and egg-laying behavior depend on flight. Wings are structures to fly and as such face a number of physical and physiological challenges. The convex curvature along the anterior-posterior axis of the wing generates a camber that must be carefully regulated. One of the most interesting ways of wing bending is provided by the bullae, which have been defined as short sections of flexible chitin, where the flexion lines cross veins. Although the bullae have been frequently used as taxonomic characters, there is no study focused on their morphology, although their prevalence on the wings of mayflies strongly suggests a role in flight. In order to identify evolutionary trends of these structures within Ephemeroptera, we constructed a matrix with comparative anatomy data of the bullae from whole mounts of the wings of 300 specimens belonging to 70 species of several mayfly families, as well as scanning microscopy samples of selected specimens. We also surveyed the number of bullae and their distribution in the wings of the different species within the South American Leptophlebiidae clade. We optimized the characters onto the latest published phylogeny for Leptophlebiidae.
昆虫是最早飞向天空的动物，它们已经飞行了超过3.2亿年。蜉蝣目是现存有翅昆虫中最早期分化的谱系，或者至少是其一部分。现存物种的成虫寿命非常短，主要用于繁殖和散播卵。交配和产卵行为依赖于飞行。翅膀是用于飞行的结构，因此面临着许多物理和生理挑战。沿着翅膀前后轴的凸曲率会产生一个必须仔细调节的弧度。翅泡提供了一种最有趣的翅膀弯曲方式，翅泡被定义为几丁质柔韧性较强的短节段，其弯曲线与翅脉交叉。尽管翅泡经常被用作分类特征，但尚无关于其形态学的研究，尽管它们在蜉蝣翅膀上的普遍存在强烈表明其在飞行中发挥作用。为了确定蜉蝣目内这些结构的进化趋势，我们构建了一个矩阵，其中包含来自70种蜉蝣科几个物种的300个标本翅膀整体装片的翅泡比较解剖学数据，以及选定标本的扫描显微镜样本。我们还调查了南美细蜉科分支内不同物种翅膀上翅泡的数量及其分布。我们将这些特征优化到最新发表的细蜉科系统发育树上。
