The family Percussion belongs to the insect family Coleoptera, distributed on all continents of the world, with about 10,000 species. There are about 200 species of luminescent taxa reported, mainly in Latin America and Oceania. For a long time, there has been confusion as to whether there is also a distribution of luminous percussions outside of Latin America and Oceania. This confusion has finally been solved recently. Bi Wenxuan, an insect taxonomy enthusiast from Shanghai and a guest researcher in the Evolutionary Genomics and Gene Origin Research Group of the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, discovered a luminous percussion nail during a scientific expedition to western Yunnan in 2017, which usually does not emit light, but only emits light during take-off.
Combining morphological evidence and molecular phylogenetic analysis evidence, the Evolutionary Genomics and Gene Origins Group demonstrated that this species represents a new subfamily of the family SinopyrophorinaeBi & Li (2019) as a new species of a new genus (Sinopyrophorus Bi & Li, 2019), and named Sinopyrophorus schimmeli Bi et Li, 2019. The discovery breaks the notion that luminous percussion is distributed only in Latin America and Oceania, and also suggests the importance of southwest China in the geographical evolution of insects. The discovery of this luminescent percussion also provides an important research system for exploring the origin and evolution of biofluorescence.
The findings were published July 17 in the journal Zookeys. Bi Wenxuan and He Jinwu, a graduate of Kunming Institute of Zoology, are the co-first authors of the article, and Li Xueyan, an associate researcher of Kunming Institute of Zoology, is the first corresponding author of the article. The research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Yunnan Provincial Science and Technology Project and the "Western Light" project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Source: Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences