[Taxacom] Order Homoptera probably not paraphyletic after all

[John Grehan]

I grew up with Hempitera as the order and Homoptera and Heteroptera as
monophyletic suborders. Only when I transitioned to the northern hemisphere
did I run into their ranking as orders. Looks like there are two options
for ranking these groups.

John Grehan

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 2:12 PM, Kenneth Kinman <kinman at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Dear All,                                 Many entomologists today regard
> Homoptera as paraphyletic, and therefore have dumped them in with the
> Heteroptera into an expanded Hemiptera sensu lato.  I never have liked this
> great expansion of Hemiptera to also include all the Homoptera, (and of
> course, it is not necessary if one considers paraphyletic taxa as natural
> and useful).                         In any case, a fairly recent paper
> (published a little over 2 years ago) was published in PLOS ONE which
> presents molecular evidence that Homoptera is probably holophyletic after
> all, and a sister group to Heteroptera.  They show that most trees actually
> show a holophyletic (strictly monophyletic) Homoptera, and that those few
> trees showing a paraphyletic Homoptera are skewed due to long branch
> attraction with outgroup taxa.                So for those of you who still
> use Order Homoptera and Order Heteroptera, instead of a huge heterogenous
> Order Hemiptera, I applaud you.  If Homoptera isn't paraphyletic, there is
> no reason for the paraphyly haters to over split (or in this case overlump)
> this perfectly good taxon.  Here's a weblink to the paper:
> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0048778
>                    ------------------Cheers,
>                       Ken
> Kinman---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
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