Pyrops watanabei – Taiwanese local with German, Italian, Surinamese and British influence

Watanabe’s Lanternfly is a relative to the cicadas, which is endemic to Taiwan, which means it can only be found there. It was found by Kenji Watanabe and described by Shōnen Matsumura, a Japanese. There is a wonderful paper about these nice planthoppers. For the longest time, I thought is a moth, maybe because of the size (almost 4cm, compared to many planthoppers that are 1cm only).

But that is not the only confusion these animals spread! Lanternfly is the common name, and it is not only associated with the lantern-like appearance of the head. It is a myth that those heads can glow! Imagine a time when macro photography was nothing but a dream, like 300 years ago. People like the German naturalist and biological illustrator, Maria Sibylla Merian, were your only chance to get a picture of what e.g. the flora and fauna of tropical Suriname looked like. So she did draw pictures and published the famous Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium after traveling for 2 years, starting at the age of 52. And it happened that she is the mother of some long-lasting common names! Not only Lanternfly but also the famous Bird spiders (Theraphosidae) got their name from her drawings. Imagine only a few years before her work, people still considered insects as something magically emerging from the dirt. So she was a modern thinker, I wonder if she heard about Francesco Redi, who only 31 years earlier proved that „Omne vivum ex ovo.“, “All life comes from life”.

So that’s the nice story I found, and here comes the paper that says luminescence of the lanterns has been mentioned some 50 years earlier by other people. It is very interesting to read and a nice example of how research shines a different light on topics.

So do Lanternflies glow or what? Looks like they don’t. Researchers in London tried to get them glowing without success, as this paper mentions.

So we have a Lanternfly from Taiwan, described by a Japanese, with a common name influenced by a German, or maybe not, as a Brazilian team noted, and we were learning from a Guatemalian Team that the British tried to get them glow without success.