spread by an inconspicuous, plant-feeding insect called the meadow spittlebug. An analysis of amateur photographs and other data, published this week in, sucking the sap of more than 1300 plant species, almost twice as many as the insect with the next broadest diet. That could spell bad news for crop farmers.
“Spittlebug” is a term that refers to the immature stage of insects often called froghoppers. The bugs are so named because the urine these juveniles excrete forms protective saliva-like masses of tiny bubbles visible on plant stems. Most sap-sucking insects drill into a nutrient-dense plant tissue called phloem, but spittlebugs specialize in the much more dilute sap from another tissue, xylem.
Altogether, they found the meadow spittlebug is hosted by 1311 plants belonging to 631 genera and 117 families, particularly the daisy and rose families. But surprisingly, this species also enjoys ferns, grasses, and shrubs as well as trees, they and colleagues report. There is even a new“It can be found everywhere in and in the wild,” says Domenico Bosco of the University of Torino , an entomologist who studies how insects spread plant pathogens.
The research is “very nice,” says Rodrigo Almeida, a UNITO plant disease ecologist. But he is not surprised by the spittlebug’s massive menu given the effort that went into tracking down what this bug eats. “The number of hosts corresponds with the number of people looking and number of environments looked at,” he points out. Even so, the work raises important awareness of the risk this insect and its bacterial invaders pose to plants in Europe and around the world, he says.