11/5/2021: The legend of One-Eyed Willy

It’s fascinating to find aberrant roaches and work backwards to see if they’re the result of some weird genetics, deformity, or getting monched by their conspecifics. Sometimes these determinations can (disappointingly) take years to come to fruition.

Enter One-Eyed Willy, a Lucihormetica verrucosa with an absent spot. What kind of glow-spot roach doesn’t have a spot, you may ask? Well, until semi-recently these spotted species and their unspotted relatives were classified in the same genus (which may have been Hormetica, but I cannot recall at the moment). The split was made to differentiate between those with spots (Luci- meaning light-bearing) and those without, which is how we have Hormetica and Lucihormetica. Without having looked into the taxonomy much, it seems if species in the Lucihormetica clade lost their spots for any reason, we would end up with a polyphyletic Hormetica, but this is just devil’s advocate speculation and perhaps other data such as genitalia, genetic, etc. doesn’t support this.

Regardless, One-Eyed Willy may provide some nifty answers to how the spots emerged if his condition is indeed genetic. It seems his pronotum is smaller from front to back where the spot is missing compared to the spotted side, so it seems there is a degree of anatomical compensation for the spots.

While looking at discarded pronota from glowspots in the past it’s become apparent that there is a “window” where the spots are, which shows the coloration of the underlying tissue. This is the reason you can manipulate the spot color by changing the diet, as exoskeleton color changes are nearly impossible in insects without extreme modification gimmicks (see tortoise beetles). I’m curious if the pronotum window and underlying tissue go hand-in-hand: IE, is One-Eyed Willy one-eyed both inside and out?

To further investigate his condition, I did pair One-Eyed Willy with some virgin females and the progeny are about to mature. I will probably do a cross between him and some daughters as well sibling crosses to see if anything can be teased out genetically.

Ideally and most informatively, both one-eyed and spotless phenotypes come out of the crosses, which would reveal a lot. From there, I can work on isolating lines with these traits and further bastardizing the discussion on Lucihormetica. Just kidding… a little

-Kyle