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Photo#340901
Tiny mystery hexapod

Tiny mystery hexapod
New Orleans, uptown, Orleans Parish, Louisiana, USA
October 1, 2009
Size: >0.5mm
This thing is super duper tiny. I found it on a microscope slide among some microleps that I'd mounted. I don't know if it came with the caterpillars, or if it was in some dust that got on the slide.

It is a fraction of a millimeter long. The mounting medium was still soft, so I was able to roll it over to get these three views of it.

Moved
Moved from Stylopidae.

Pohl is correct on the taxonomy. Kathirithamby's 2005 paper ignored taxonomic work by Pohl (2002) entirely. Virtually every other paper in the 2 decades since, including McMahon et al. (2011) that included Kathirithamby as a co-author, have followed the split of Stylopidae s.l. into Stylopidae s.s. (=former Stylopinae) and Xenidae (= former Xeninae).

Nearctica is quite well before Pohl's work, with the volume including Strepsiptera being as old as 1996. Much of its taxonomy is obsolete now.

See more detailed publication history on this proposal.

Moved
Moved from Xenidae.

thanks, Mark [great addition!] and Dr. Pohl for the ID & info

 
We need to rethink this
You'll notice that Xenos is under Stylopidae (following Nearctica), but there's also this node and Mymecolacidae, which don't follow Nearctica. There's disagreement in more recent treatments over whether this is a family or subfamily- so I think we need to agree on the taxonomy before everything gets even more tangled.

 
sure, thanks --missed you comment
Kathirithamby treats Xeninae as part of Stylopidae, he's the man.

Moved
Moved from ID Request.

hmmmmm....
no clue. huge coxae... a beetle larva? a Thysanura hatchling?

 
triungulin?
My guess would be a triungulin of sorts. Possibly a strepsipteran, meloid or ripiphorid? Is a better shot of the tarsal claws possible?

Re: triungulins - according to the Strepsiptera page referenced above "This term was initially applied to the Meloidae, because of the presence of three claws on the legs. The term was later extended to the Rhipiphoridae and Strepsiptera, and refers to the active host-seeking larvae. However, morphologically, the 1st instar larvae of Strepsiptera do not resemble the Meloidae. The pulvillus of the 1st pair of legs is disk-like, and slender; single, spine-like tarsi are present on the 2nd and 3rd pair of legs, while there is absence of claws. In addition, the 1st instars have highly serrated tergites and sternites, presumably to enable them to cling to the hosts and/or vegetation while awaiting entry. The head bears antennae, mandibles, and labrium, and the abdominal setae are long, and are about a third or half the body length."

 
triungulin was my very first thought...
...but i dismissed the idea immediately -- only because Strepsiptera didn't cross my [f]ailing mind

 
I am very sure that these are
I am very sure that these are Strepsiptera 1st instar larvae.
Check out the pics on TOL: http://tolweb.org/strepsiptera

 
I am very excited about this!
I have collected lots of adult female strepsiptera (in planthoppers), and one adult male. This is the first triungulin that I've ever seen!

 
Send Hans Pohl an email he di
Send Hans Pohl an email he did his PhD about Strepsiptera larvae and he should even be able to give you an ID what genus it could be:
Hans Pohl hans.pohl@uni-jena.de

 
family Xenidae
Following your suggestion, I emailed Hans Pohl, and he graciously identified it to family for me. I'll try to get some closer shots of its head and tarsi, in which case he said he can probably tell me the genus.

 
Life history
Dr. Pohl said that this family parasitizes Vespidae and Sphecidae, and that the triungulins are phoretic. He thinks that this is almost certainly why the triungulin was associated with the caterpillar: it was hitching a ride, hoping that the caterpillar would be picked off by a vespid or sphecid wasp.

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