Treehoppers. They exist. Deal with it.

Firstly: Did God drop acid back in the day?

The second thing one asks is, “What the bloody hell is all that ornamentation on the thorax?” (Note that the “balls” on the antenna-like structure aren’t eyes, but simply spheres of chitin.)  A first guess is that it’s a sexually-selected trait, but those are often limited to males, and these creatures show the ornaments in both sexes.  Kemp hypothesizes—and this seems quite reasonable—that “the hollow globes, like the remarkable excrescences exhibited by other treehoppers, probably deter predators.”  It would be hard to grab, much less chow down on, a beast with all those spines and excrescences.

More pix and the full article by  ecologist Jerry A Coyne here.

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