Hawaiian Miridae (Hemiptera: Heteroptera): The Evolution of Bugs and Thought

Abstract

Composition of the Hawaiian Miridae is unusual in the preponderance of the subfamily Orthotylinae, with at least 10 independent colonizations. Most of these colonizations appear to have Indo-Pacific origins, but at least some taxa are derived from North and South America. Collections and research on Hawaiian Miridae began with Blackburn in the 1880s and Perkins from 1890 to 1910. They collected only the common and larger taxa. Specimens of smaller, more delicate species generally did not survive intact to reach museums, and there was little focus on host-plant associations. These two workers collected 85% of the known genera, but a relatively small number of species. Kirkaldy described the generic-level taxa from Blackburn's and Perkins' specimens in the early 1900s, but he failed to recognize the species-level diversity of the Hawaiian fauna. From 1905 to 1940, workers with the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association focused on host plants and collected most species of host-specific Miridae. In the 1960s and 1970s, Robert Usinger and Wayne Gagne associated some groups of Hawaiian Miridae with their host plants and began to publish descriptions of these patterns. In the 1980s and 1990s the first phylogenies were constructed and biogeographic and evolutionary hypotheses were proposed. Current information indicates a myriad of mirid evolutionary patterns in Hawai'i, including (1) nonhost specific and no island endemism, (2) nonhost specific single-island endemism, (3) radiations on related host plants, (4) radiations on unrelated host plants, (5) sympatric speciation within islands, and (6) allopatric speciation between islands, within islands between mountains, and within mountains.