JERUSALEM, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- Israeli and Chinese researchers have uncovered an unusual feeding organ that may have helped an insect survive in harsh prehistoric forests approximately 100 million years ago, Israel's Tel Aviv University said in a statement on Sunday.
The researchers from Tel Aviv University and Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, studied fossilized insects preserved in amber from the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs still existed. The insects, belonging to an ancient group related to modern cicadas, had a feeding organ unlike that of any living or extinct relatives.
The insect was named Noo-Noo, the vacuum cleaner character from the children's Television series Teletubbies, due to its long, flexible mouthparts.
The long mouthparts, often exceeding the length of the body, terminated in a segment covered in fine, accordion-like folds whose function has remained unclear.
The researchers made a comparative analysis of the mouthpart morphology using a high-resolution 3D X-ray imaging technique and found that the cuticular corrugations were a mechanical adaptation that increased the flexibility of the tubular feeding structure while resisting kinking and buckling.
They suggested in the journal Insects that this straw-like mouthpart facilitated probing into deep bark and other mechanically resistant plant tissues, potentially enabling access to the vascular bundles that sit deep inside plants, which may give Noo-Noo an evolutionary advantage.
They also observed that the mouthpart tip could expand like a wall plug and may have helped with anchoring to the surface during feeding. Similar corrugated structures evolved independently in several unrelated Cretaceous insects, suggesting that these ancient forests supported such feeding strategies. ■
