Origins of New Zealand Cicadas

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DEB 00-89946Christine M. SimonDr. Chris Simon and colleagues at the University of Connecticut have been awarded a grant to test classical hypotheses concerning the influence of landscape and climate changes on speciation using cicadas. In addition to creating an evolutionary tree (genealogy) for related New Zealand (NZ) Australian (AU) and New Caledonian (NC) cicada genera, this project will: 1) Describe unknown species and enlarge our sound library for species identification; 2) Use new Bayesian statistics to estimate molecular clock dates of speciation events; 3) Create an "electronic field guide" to the cicadas of NZ, and related AU & NC species, and 4) Train a Postdoctoral Research Associate. The 40 species (5 genera) of NZ cicadas are ideal for this work because their natural history and distributions are well studied, they inhabit almost all NZ ecosystems, and they are hypothesized to have diversified in concert with well-documented geological/ climatological events. This research will test biogeographic hypotheses by adding a crucial time dimension.This work will enhance knowledge of a newly described and highly diverse fauna and contribute to the understanding of the biogeography of the Austral-Pacific region. It will resurrect valuable unpublished field notes and taxonomic sketches by C. A. Fleming and J. S. Dugdale who studied NZ cicadas for nearly twenty years. All results will appear on Dr. Simon's website, Cicada Central, including species distribution maps, lists of world researchers, web-searchable specimen databases, photographs of species and habitats, phylogenetic trees of relationships, and species descriptions. This site will link to other systematics databases and will comprise an electronic field guide to the cicadas of NZ, AU, and NC The grant will train a postdoctoral associate in all aspects of systematics from tree building to species description. Finally, this research will create a foundation for future work including: combined analysis of morphology and molecules in collaboration with AUS and NC researchers; revision of the NZ cicada genera; a deep-level evolutionary tree of cicada tribes and of the insect order Hemiptera; and an analysis of the role of sexual signal evolution in speciation.