Ученые раскрыли секрет уникального «сифона» вымершего насекомого, питавшегося соком деревьев

About 99 million years ago, a planthopper died on a tree in what is today Myanmar. This insect was a member of the suborder of Neazoniidae, now extinct, and its body was preserved forever more by becoming trapped in resin, which would fossilize over millions of years into amber. Neazoniidae planthoppers lived in the Cretaceous period over a vast geographical range. At least 20 fossil neazoniid species have been found in the Levant and Eurasia, mostly in amber, and this Cretaceous cousin of the cicada had a feeding mechanism like nothing ever seen before or since. The story is told this month in the journal MDPI (Insects) by grad student Dolev Fabrikant of Tel Aviv University and Dr Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou from The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History and Dr Yanzhe Fu of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology. What was this extraordinary feeding apparatus? An extremely elongated, flexible proboscis, the researchers say. Cicadas, butterflies, moths, bees and mosquitoes all drink through a proboscis. But the schnoz on these "Noo-noo" bugs, nicknamed after the Teletubbies' vacuum cleaner, was another league. The cicada proboscis is rigid and just long enough to span the gap between the insect's face and the plant on which it squats. Fossil Neazoniidae had flexible proboscises that could run double their body length, unlike that found in any of their living or extinct relatives. The scientists inferred proboscis flexibility because in several fossils it's bent in various directions. Fabrikant chose the soubriquet Noo-noo because of the cartoon vacuum's large eyes and extended mouthpart, he tells Haaretz by phone. This exotic oral structure and possibly even the fact that the bug in question died on a tree suggest that Neazoniidae had adapted to niche feeding. What niche? A simple X-ray of the amberized arthropod wouldn't cut it. For deeper insight into the Noo-noo's oral anatomy, the researchers used a particle accelerator in Hamburg, Germany, as one does. The accelerator enabled the team to shoot insanely powerful X-ray beams through the deceased insect and visualize its internal structure at microscopic resolution. The result was a 3D model with the revelation that the creature's mouthpart had a rigid outer sheath covering a hollow needle. The neazoniid would sit on a tree and touch the surface it wished to drink from with the sheath. Then the needle could shoot out and penetrate deep. Into what? Tree bark, the researchers suggest. The sheath could ram through breaks in bark, and the flexible proboscis could worm its way through the tree tissue until reaching the desired sap layer, a niche untapped by other bugs, which would have given the Noo-noo an evolutionary advantage. Supporting the tree diet theory, the team notes that Neozoniidae in amber do not have pollen, but butterflies, which dine on flowers, do. Fabrikant adds that the neozooniid also had beautiful wings, so lovely that one might confuse the two unrelated insects. In addition, the particle accelerator helped reveal that the tip of Noo-noo's proboscis had a unique structure with two serrated lobes that would expand as the insect sucked, anchoring it to the plant. Planthoppers today have a "regular" proboscis. Noo-noo is no more and the hose-like, flexible proboscis is also gone. Butterflies have quite a long, flexible proboscis, but not like the Noo-noo variety; the butterfly beak serves only as a drinking straw, while the Noo-noo's functioned like a syringe – a mechanism that exists no more.