Treehoppers: the Princess Beatrice of the Insect World

Insects called "treehoppers"sport hats as crazy as Princess Beatrice, except it's possible the insects are more fashion-forward. They're much more beautiful to my taste, anyway. Treehopper hats are actually thorn-like projections of their own body, and are permanently attached between their head and wings (the body is the small yellowish legs and light brown midsection below this Cladonota species' expressionistic "C") 

You'd think these oddly large and awkwardly shaped pronouncements would be too cumbersome for scuttling around on tree branches and eating sap; Princess Beatrice is quite happy that she doesn't have to wear that ludicrous nonsense for the rest of her life for fear of hitting her head on every doorframe she walks through. But, the 2-inch-long treehoppers are positively chuffed. They probably use their adornments as camouflage or as intimidation, or at least that's what it looks like to us humans. 

You can imagine this intimidating treehopper, whose hat looks like the lethal claws of a European rhinoceros beetle, leaving predators running scared: 

....or a group of Costa Rican treehoppers impersonating the local bird of paradise foliage to blend in:

....this treehopper looks just like an ant:

 

 ...many different ways to impersonate a stick, a leaf, or another animal:

The creative headgear comes in an astonishing number of variations, and is actually like a third wing, growing alongside the wings as the insects matures. In the treehopper's nymph stag--before their final molt to adulthood--the insects' Hox gene, responsible for making sure their head, segments, and wings end up in the right place, assists making these wild sculptures attached to the first segment of their body, between the head and wings. The Hox protein activates and deactivates genes involved in making wings, and the wild treehopper helmets probably evolved because of a deactivation of a long-time repressed wing-making gene for the first body segment. Here's the developing treehopper nymph, from a recent paper (red is where the helmet is growing, blue is where the wings grow):

In nature, it's rare to find an insect that evolves to add and appendage or enlarge a feature of the body--most often you see wings and body getting smaller as these bugs evolve over thousands of years. The treehopper is truly an eccentric bug.

SOURCE: Nature, Live Science