You are what you eat: Dissecting diets in plant bugs

Miridae is one of the most diverse families in Insecta with more than 11,000 described species inhabiting every region of the world except for Antarctica. Despite this diversity, knowledge about plant bug (Hemiptera:Miridae) habits can often be lacking, due to the difficulties of rearing colonies and observing them in the field. This is true for all but a few species of agricultural importance. The limited knowledge of what feeding habits mirids have are often speculation and they can have a variety of feeding habits from plant feeding to predation to both. Various methods have been used to bridge these knowledge gaps with varying success, PCR DNA amplification, stable isotope analysis, and mouthpart morphology are three methods that have been used successfully to determine the diet of insects. Stable isotope analysis analyzes the ratio of stable isotopes in an organism to determine their position in trophic levels and what they eat (i.e. plants or animals). Mouthpart morphology is efficient for determining what kind of food an organism is capable of eating based on the structure of their mouthparts as insect mouthparts are often highly adaptive to their diets. PCR can be used to amplify the DNA in the gut contents of the insect, this is really useful for determining if an insect's host plant is the plant that they feed on. All three of these methods are going to be used individually and conjunctly for analysis, as the results from each method will be compared.