Erinn Finely
Contributing Writer
efinley1@murraystate.edu
A Murray State assistant professor in the biology department, discovered a new insect while planting with her daughter. Laura Sullivan-Beckers is a behavioral ecologist, who studies the communication and mating behaviors of treehoppers and spiders.
“She was two years old at the time, so when I let her water the soil, she went a little overboard and eventually flooded the flower bed,” Beckers said.
Beckers noticed small insects had floated to the top of the water.
“I did my doctoral research with this group of insects, the treehoppers (Family Membracidae) and I knew that they were plant-living insects and did not live underground,” Beckers said.
After this initial observation, Beckers began a months-long investigation. Beckers dug out the entire flower bed and screened it for treehoppers. She then resampled the soil every day for eight weeks. In the end, she recovered hundreds of treehoppers representing 24 different species.
She recognized many of the species from her previous work. She checked with her doctoral advisor Rex Cocroft about those she did not recognize. He identified almost all of them.
A bright-green, teardrop-shaped bug surprised him. He had seen treehoppers that looked similar, but only in Central America.
When Cocroft noticed that Beckers Insect was an unusual find in the United States, he recommended that she contact Stu McKamey, an insect specialist with the United States Department of Agriculture.
Beckers mailed McKamey several specimens. Over several months, he ran a detailed comparison of these insects to similar insects found in museums around the world.
McKamey found unique traits in these insects. This species was not yet known to the scientific community.
In 2019 Beckers and McKamey published a paper about this new species. This essay featured the insects’ discovery, its unique traits and its taxonomic relationship to other insects.
Beckers and McKamey also formally named the insect, Hebetica sylviae, after Beckers’ daughter, Sylvie.
Beckers has been searching for live specimens of this insect since her initial discovery in 2016. When she discovered the insects, burrowing wasps were using them to feed their larvae.
James Kindt, a chemistry professor at Emory University, found live insects in Atlanta in the summer of 2020. He mailed three female specimens to Beckers, but she could not learn much from them.
Beckers found the live insects in Murray in the summer of 2021 and is now working toward understanding their biology.
“Naturally, I want to know all about the kinds of signals they use to communicate,” Beckers said. “Do males and females signal? What about the juveniles? What does treehopper courtship look like? How many times do they mate?”
Beckers said just in the last week, she has made great strides in recording and understanding how they communicate. She said they have a rich suite of vibrational signals that they use to navigate their complex mating lives.
Beckers also needs to discover the basic life information of this new species. She is working to answer questions such as, how long they live, on which host plants they live and where they live.
“Much of this information I will gather on my own, but mapping their distribution would take more time than is realistically possible for one working mother,” Beckers said.
Citizen scientists can help achieve the goal of determining the geographic range of this species. Beckers found the host plant, which is the white Mulberry tree (Morus alba). This tree is not native to the United States. It was introduced in the 1600s and is now very widespread.
Beckers suspects that the bugs originally lived on the native Mulberry tree (Morus rubra), but switched over when the white Mulberry was introduced.
Once Beckers discovered the insects on white Mulberry trees, she realized they were actually quite common.
Beckers has reached out to friends and colleagues all across the United States and Canada to ask them to be on the lookout for this new insect.
“My hope is that by educating the public and enough bug-interested people, observations of the treehopper will fill in this gap in our current knowledge,” Beckers said.
So far, this species has been found in Murray, Kentucky and Atlanta, Georgia. Beckers said if readers of the Murray State News have family outside of the immediate area, it would be helpful to share this story with them.
Beckers started a project with iNaturalist, an online database where people can share observations of the natural world. iNaturalist will alert Beckers whenever someone posts a picture of treehoppers. This database also preserves location information on uploaded photos, making it the perfect tool for mapping.
Beckers used a free version of an app called, Picture This, to learn to identify Mulberry trees. All you have to do is take a picture and it will identify a plant for you. Beckers said this app reliably identified different types of Mulberry trees.
If you see a treehopper, you can snap a photo and upload it to https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/hunt-for-new-raindrop-treehopper.