''Altica'' (

New Latin New Latin (also called Neo-Latin or Modern Latin) is the revival of Literary Latin used in original, scholarly, and scientific works since about 1500. Modern scholarly and technical nomenclature, such as in zoological and botanical taxonomy ...

from

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

, ''haltikós'', "jumper" or "jumping") is a large

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nom ...

flea beetle The flea beetle is a small, jumping beetle of the leaf beetle family (Chrysomelidae), that makes up the tribe Alticini which is part of the subfamily Galerucinae. Historically the flea beetles were classified as their own subfamily. Though mo ...

s in the subfamily

Galerucinae The Galerucinae are a large subfamily of the leaf beetles (Chrysomelidae), containing about 15,000 species in more than 1000 genera, of which about 500 genera and about 8000 species make up the flea beetle tribe Alticini. The division into t ...

, with about 300 species, distributed nearly worldwide.Ross H. Arnett et al. ''American Beetles'', Vol. 2: ''Polyphaga: Scarabaeoidea through Curculionoidea''. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2002. . P. 662–663. The genus is best represented in the

Neotropical realm The Neotropical realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms constituting Earth's land surface. Physically, it includes the tropical terrestrial ecoregions of the Americas and the entire South American temperate zone. Definition In biogeo ...

, well represented in the

Nearctic The Nearctic realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms constituting the Earth's land surface. The Nearctic realm covers most of North America, including Greenland, Central Florida, and the highlands of Mexico. The parts of North America ...

and Palearctic, but occurs also in the

Afrotropic The Afrotropical realm is one of Earth's eight biogeographic realms. It includes Africa south of the Sahara Desert, the majority of the Arabian Peninsula, the island of Madagascar, southern Iran and extreme southwestern Pakistan, and the island ...

Indomalaya The Indomalayan realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms. It extends across most of South and Southeast Asia and into the southern parts of East Asia. Also called the Oriental realm by biogeographers, Indomalaya spreads all over the Indi ...

, and

Australasia Australasia is a region that comprises Australia, New Zealand and some neighbouring islands in the Pacific Ocean. The term is used in a number of different contexts, including geopolitically, physiogeographically, philologically, and ecologi ...

. The species are similar to each other, small metallic blue-green-bronze beetles, often distinguished from each other only by the aedeagus. The species of ''Altica'', both as larvae and as adults, are

phytophagous A herbivore is an animal anatomically and physiologically adapted to eating plant material, for example foliage or marine algae, for the main component of its diet. As a result of their plant diet, herbivorous animals typically have mouthpar ...

, feeding on plant foliage of various food plant

taxa In biology, a taxon (back-formation from ''taxonomy''; plural taxa) is a group of one or more populations of an organism or organisms seen by taxonomists to form a unit. Although neither is required, a taxon is usually known by a particular nam ...

, specific for each ''Altica'' species.

Onagraceae The Onagraceae are a family of flowering plants known as the willowherb family or evening primrose family. They include about 650 species of herbs, shrubs, and treesRosaceae (mainly ''

Rubus ''Rubus'' is a large and diverse genus of flowering plants in the rose family, Rosaceae, subfamily Rosoideae, with over 1,350 species. Raspberries, blackberries, and dewberries are common, widely distributed members of the genus. Most of the ...

'') are the dominant host plant families for

Holarctic The Holarctic realm is a biogeographic realm that comprises the majority of habitats found throughout the continents in the Northern Hemisphere. It corresponds to the floristic Boreal Kingdom. It includes both the Nearctic zoogeographical reg ...

species. The adult ''Altica'' beetles are able to jump away when approached.

Selected species

References

Further reading