• Beetle in the coconut: Fossil find sheds

    From ScienceDaily@1:317/3 to All on Monday, April 25, 2022 22:30:44
    Beetle in the coconut: Fossil find sheds new light on Neotropical
    rainforests
    South American fossil reveals earliest evidence of seed beetle predation
    in palm fruit

    Date:
    April 25, 2022
    Source:
    Penn State
    Summary:
    Tiny beetles that feed on fruit from the palm family may have
    developed their taste for coconuts long ago, according to a team of
    scientists studying suspected insect damage in a 60-million-year-old
    fossil.



    FULL STORY ==========================================================================
    Tiny beetles that feed on fruit from the palm family may have developed
    their taste for coconuts long ago, according to a Penn State-led team
    of scientists studying suspected insect damage in a 60-million-year-old
    fossil.


    ==========================================================================
    "We found this remarkable fossil coconut that has clear signs of insect tunneling," said L. Alejandro Giraldo, a graduate student in geosciences
    at Penn State. "After studying the damage in detail, we were able to
    pinpoint the insect culprit: a group of beetles commonly referred to
    as palm bruchines that today still eat lots of palm fruit -- coconuts included." The findings represent the earliest fossil evidence of seed
    beetles feeding on palm fruit and shed new light on the Neotropical
    rainforests that emerged in modern day South America following the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago that wiped
    out the dinosaurs and reshaped life on Earth, the scientists said.

    "These were the first Neotropical forests as we know them today," said
    Giraldo, whose adviser is Peter Wilf, professor of geosciences at Penn
    State. "We know these forests had similar plants compared to today,
    and the next step is knowing what was happening to these forests -- for
    example how insects were interacting with the plants." Previous studies
    have focused on insect damage to fossil leaves, the most abundant plant
    parts found in the fossil record, the scientists said. Examples of
    insect damage to fruit and seeds are less common, but scientists found
    six suspected insect holes on a coconut fossil from a site in modern
    day Colombia.

    The fossil contained damage to the outer and inner layers of the
    fruit, revealing a three-dimensional path that suggests the holes had
    a biological origin -- like from larvae eating their way through the
    coconut, the scientists said.



    ==========================================================================
    The team analyzed the number, position and size of the holes and the
    scar tissue left behind and compared that with damaged caused by modern insects, especially those that feed on plants from the palm family. The
    damage was consistent with a sub-group of modern beetles called palm
    bruchines, the scientists reported in the journal Review of Palaeobotany
    and Palynology.

    "There are thousands of different insect species that can feed on seeds,
    but not many of them feed on palm seeds, so that was the way to start,"
    Giraldo said. "After that it was doing a lot of detective work, really
    digging into the literature and studying different morphological features
    in terms of how this damage occurs. And it paid off." This kind of relationship between specific plants and insects -- called specialized interactions -- plays an important role in creating and maintaining plant diversity in modern Neotropical rainforests. By eating and destroying
    seeds, these highly specialized insects help prevent any one group of
    plants from dominating the landscape.

    The findings suggest that palm bruchines have consistently eaten palm
    fruits for at least 60 million years and that the specialized interactions
    that define modern-day Neotropical rainforests have occurred through
    geological time, the scientists said.

    "This is something that we see 60 million years ago, and it's something
    that is still occurring today," Giraldo said. "Our contribution is that
    we pinpoint this specific group of insects as the culprit, and that group
    is still living today and attacks the same coconuts and same palms as
    it did in the past." Also contributing to this research were Mo'nica
    Carvalho, postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research
    Institute and a former graduate student at Penn State, Fabiany Herrera, assistant curator of paleobotany at the Field Museum of Natural History
    in Chicago, and Conrad Labandeira, senior research geologist and curator
    of fossil arthropods at the Smithsonian Institution.

    The National Science Foundation provided funding for this work.


    ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Penn_State. Original written by
    Matthew Carroll. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


    ========================================================================== Related Multimedia:
    * Palm_bruchine_tunnels_on_a_fossil_Coconut_fruit ========================================================================== Journal Reference:
    1. L. Alejandro Giraldo, Mo'nica R. Carvalho, Fabiany Herrera,
    Conrad C.

    Labandeira. Ancient trouble in paradise: Seed beetle predation on
    coconuts from middle-late Paleocene rainforests of Colombia. Review
    of Palaeobotany and Palynology, 2022; 300: 104630 DOI: 10.1016/
    j.revpalbo.2022.104630 ==========================================================================

    Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220425121126.htm

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