Parental Cydnidae species

Presently five species within four genera (Sehirus, Adomerus, Tritomegas, Canthophorus) in the family Cydnidae have been found to display similar parental care behaviors (egg/nymph guarding, trophic egg production, progressive provisioning), with several variant manifestations of each of the different behaviors, but their life histories don’t have quite the same constraints as those experienced by P. japonensis. They are all iteroperous (several reproductive events, or, in this case, several egg clutches) and can feed on seeds of a few related plants in the family Lamiaceae, such as purple deadnettle (Lamium purpureum) and henbit (Lamium amplexicaule) in North America and Japan, lamb’s ear (Stachys byzantina) in North America, and Thesium chinense (Santalaceae) and Japanese elm (Ulmus davidiana: Ulmaceae) in Japan. There are four parental cydnid species in Japan that my collaborators and I have investigated, but only one species (Sehirus cinctus) inhabits North America (Sehirus cinctus). My students and I have been rearing and investigating S. cinctus cinctus in the lab for several years. We have recently collected a second subspecies (S. cinctus albonotatus) from a field site I discovered at the Massabesic Audubon Center in Auburn, New Hampshire, and are rearing this in the lab. We will carry out comparative studies with the two North American subspecies. Most of our research involves examining the various manifestations of each of the parental care behaviors displayed in the six species in the context of the specific environmental constraints the different species have experienced over evolutionary time.