Aphaena Lanternfly
Aphaena submaculata
With its wings closed, Aphaena submaculata keeps its brightest colour almost entirely to itself. The broad forewings are mottled in earthy browns, grey and olive, broken by darker spots that sit comfortably against bark and vegetation. Open them and the insect changes rather abruptly. Red to pinkish orange hindwings appear underneath.
The name is misleading in two different directions. A lanternfly isn't a fly at all, but a planthopper belonging to Hemiptera alongside cicadas and leafhoppers. It doesn't carry a lantern either. Fulgorids can't produce light, despite an old natural history mistake that managed to give the entire family a rather memorable name.
Classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Hemiptera
Suborder: Auchenorrhyncha
Superfamily: Fulgoroidea
Family: Fulgoridae
Subfamily: Aphaeninae
Genus: Aphaena
Species: Aphaena submaculata
Common Name: Aphaena Lanternfly
Distribution: South and Southeast Asia
One of the Stranger True Bugs
Fulgoridae contains some wonderfully peculiar planthoppers. Several genera carry enlarged or elongated structures projecting from the head, sometimes so exaggerated that they seem to belong to another insect entirely. Aphaena is comparatively restrained at the front end. Its wings do most of the showing off.
Beneath them is a compact planthopper body equipped with piercing and sucking mouthparts. Rather than chewing plant tissue like a beetle or caterpillar, A. submaculata uses a beak like rostrum to penetrate plants and draw out fluids.
At rest, those broad forewings fold into a roof over the abdomen and conceal most of the hindwings. It's a perfectly ordinary arrangement for a planthopper, but it means a living insect and a prepared specimen can look surprisingly unlike one another.
Spread the wings and the secret is out.
Red Kept Under Wraps
The forewings are pale brown, greyish or olive brown with darker spotting scattered across their surface. It's an irregular pattern rather than a clean arrangement, breaking up the outline of what would otherwise be a fairly conspicuous pair of broad wings.
Underneath is considerably less subtle. The hindwings carry red to pinkish orange areas with darker colour towards the margins.
Concealed colour like this appears in a number of insects. Quieter outer wings can make an animal less conspicuous while it's sitting still, then brighter hindwings become visible when it moves. Once it lands and closes its wings again, the conspicuous colour abruptly disappears. This has been proposed as a way of confusing or misdirecting predators, although the function shouldn't be assumed to work identically in every species carrying bright hidden wings.
A spread specimen rather spoils the surprise. It also gives us the unusual opportunity to see both versions of the insect at once.
No Caterpillar Required
Lanternflies don't undergo the complete metamorphosis familiar from butterflies and moths. There is no caterpillar tucked into this life cycle and no chrysalis waiting between youth and adulthood.
Young A. submaculata are nymphs. They already have the basic planthopper arrangement when they hatch and grow through successive moults, becoming larger and gradually developing their wings. The final moult produces the fully winged adult.
What gets left behind is an exuvia, the empty outer covering shed during moulting. These can sometimes remain attached to vegetation after the insect has moved on.
Nymphs and adults both depend on plants for feeding. Like other sap feeding Hemiptera, they take in substantial quantities of fluid and may produce sugary waste known as honeydew. Where enough sap feeders gather, that can leave the vegetation around them unexpectedly sticky.
Across Tropical Asia
Aphaena submaculata occurs across parts of South and Southeast Asia, from the Indian subcontinent into mainland Southeast Asia. Several subspecies have been described within this wider range, reflecting geographical variation between populations.
The genus Aphaena contains other colourful Asian lanternflies, and identification isn't always as simple as matching a few spots on the forewings. Pattern, colour, anatomy and locality can all become useful when similar species or subspecies need separating.
That makes provenance especially valuable for preserved specimens. A locality label can provide information that the insect itself can't reliably supply, particularly once identification moves below species level.
The spots may offer clues. They don't come with a map.
The Lantern Was a Mistake
Lanternflies owe one of their most recognisable features to something they can't actually do.
Early European accounts of fulgorids with unusually enlarged heads helped spread the belief that these insects were luminous. The supposed lantern was taken seriously enough to find its way into natural history writing, despite there being no light producing organ waiting inside.
The idea eventually disappeared. The name didn't.
Aphaena submaculata doesn't glow, nor do its relatives need to. Their colours are visible because ordinary external light reaches pigments and structures in the wings.
Common names are very good at carrying old ideas forward. Sometimes they preserve an observation. Sometimes, as with the lanternfly, they preserve the mistake.
A Name for the Label
Aphaena submaculata has its own complications around naming. Classification within lanternflies has changed as entomologists have compared species and populations, leaving older literature and specimen records with names that don't always align neatly with current usage.
That isn't unusual in an insect collection. An old label may preserve the classification accepted when the specimen was collected, identified or sold. Following those earlier names can become part of establishing what sits in front of you now.
“Aphaena Lanternfly” is useful as a readable display name, but it isn't a universally standardised common name in the way some familiar animals have one. For a species with several similar relatives and comparatively little everyday English language use, Aphaena submaculata is the part of the label doing the precise work.
In the Apotheca
Aphaena submaculata is one of those specimens where spreading the wings reveals something the living insect normally keeps hidden.
The mottled forewings still make sense. Fold them back over the body and much of that bright red disappears underneath. Leave all four wings open and the contrast becomes impossible to miss.
There's another little trick sitting on the label. Nothing glows, and there was never a lantern to begin with. What remains is a colourful true bug carrying the name of a centuries old misunderstanding.
Between the hidden hindwings and the imaginary light, Aphaena submaculata isn't quite what it first appears to be.
Leave a comment