Overview
This paper examines cockroach (Blattodea) diversity, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Blattodea encompass cockroaches and termites, representing a major insect order with diverse ecological roles. We review current understanding of blattodean taxonomy, behavior, ecology, and the evolutionary transition from solitary cockroaches to eusocial termites.
Blattodeacockroach diversitytermitesinsect ecologyeusocialitytaxonomyevolutionary biology
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Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- A total of 134 CHC compounds were identified across the representative termite and cockroach species.
- No consistent pattern of CHC chemical complexity paralleled the levels of social complexity across the studied Blattodea species.
- The chemical dendrogram did not reflect the molecular phylogeny; a Mantel test found no significant correlation between them.
- Total CHC biosynthesis gene transcript counts did not correlate with the total number of CHC compounds detected per species.
- Counts of CHC biosynthesis gene transcripts did not vary systematically by social complexity level.
Methods
- Seven Blattodea species spanning solitary cockroaches to OPT and ST termites — Two cockroaches and five termite species of low (one-piece) and high (separate life type) social complexity were sampled from BAM Berlin lab colonies and populations.
- Hexane extraction and GC-MS/MS profiling of cuticular hydrocarbons — CHCs from single cockroaches or pools of three termite workers were analyzed by GC-MS/MS and quantified as relative proportions in MassHunter.
- UPGMA chemical dendrogram on Manhattan distances vs published phylogeny (Mantel test) — A chemical dendrogram from Manhattan CHC distances was compared with the He et al. (2021) molecular phylogeny using Mantel tests with 9999 permutations.
- HMM-based counting of CHC biosynthesis gene transcripts in whole-body transcriptomes — HMMs built from orthologs across 17 insect proteomes were searched against the seven species' proteomes with hmmsearch, then verified against Swiss-Prot.
- Poisson GLM and chi-square tests of transcript and compound counts — A Poisson GLM compared transcript counts across social complexity levels, and a chi-square test compared transcript counts with CHC compound counts per species.
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- 2024_BlattodeaDiversity.pdf PDF · 3.08 MiB · extracted-text source
Citation
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Golian, Marek J.; Friedman, Daniel A.; Harrison, Mark; McMahon, Dino P.; Buellesbach, Jan. 2024. Chemical and transcriptomic diversity do not correlate with ascending levels of social complexity in the insect order Blattodea. Ecology & Evolution. DOI: 10.1002/ece3.70063. URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.70063.
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