How a Pea Aphid Decides to Make Wings or Not

Wing development in females is environmentally controlled, but in males, an insertion on the sex chromosome appears to dictate whether the insects grow wings, according to a study.

Written byViviane Callier

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ABOVE: Male pea aphids (Acyrthosiphon pisum) come in winged and wingless morphs, a phenotype determined by an autosomal insertion on the X chromosome.
© OMID SALEH ZIABARI AND JENNIFER BRISSON

The paper
B. Li et al., “A large genomic insertion containing a duplicated follistatin gene is linked to the pea aphid male wing dimorphism,” eLife, 9:e50608, 2020.

The sap-sucking pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum) has both winged and wingless morphs. When pea aphid mothers are raised with abundant food, their asexually produced daughters develop no wings, but in crowded, food-scarce conditions, daughters are born with wings, which helps them find better living conditions. In males, which are the product of sexual reproduction, whether or not they grow wings appears to be genetically controlled. “So you’ve got one species, two dimorphisms,” explains Jennifer Brisson, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester in New York. “One is totally plastic, and the other is ...

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Meet the Author

Viviane Callier
Viviane was a Churchill Scholar at the University of Cambridge, where she studied early tetrapods. Her PhD at Duke University focused on the role of oxygen in insect body size regulation. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Arizona State University, she became a science writer for federal agencies in the Washington, DC area. Now, she freelances from San Antonio, Texas.
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