Asphondylia
Taxonomy
This page represents the following TreeOfLife-200M taxonomic path.[1]
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Arthropoda
- Class: Insecta
- Order: Diptera
- Family: Cecidomyiidae
- Genus: Asphondylia
Visual Description
Members of the genus Asphondylia are small, delicate flies typical of the family Cecidomyiidae. Based on observations from the TreeOfLife-200M dataset, these insects possess slender, elongated bodies and long, thin legs, which are characteristic of many gall midges.[1] They often exhibit a muted coloration, frequently in shades of brown, grey, or black, which may aid in camouflage on their host plants.[1] The wings are typically clear or lightly tinted and held over the back when at rest.[1]
Ecology and Lifecycle
Asphondylia is a genus of gall-inducing insects.[2] Many species within this genus are known for their complex lifecycles, which often involve host alternation between different plant species.[3] For example, Asphondylia yushimai, the soybean pod gall midge, utilizes fabaceous plants as summer hosts and various woody plants, such as those in the families Rosaceae and Oleaceae, as winter hosts.[3]
These midges typically overwinter as first-instar larvae protected within galls on their winter host plants.[3] Due to the morphological similarity between many Asphondylia species, molecular techniques, such as mitochondrial COI gene sequencing, are frequently employed for accurate species identification and to study their ecological relationships.[3]
Gallery
References
- 1 2 3 4 Dataset view for Animalia / Arthropoda / Insecta / Diptera / Cecidomyiidae / Asphondylia constructed from imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M records under this taxonomic path. Hugging Face Datasets. https://huggingface.co/datasets/imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M.
- ↑ Asphondylia. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphondylia. Accessed 2026-07-14.
- 1 2 3 4 Nami Uechi; Junichi Yukawa; Shigeshi Usuba. Discovery of an additional winter host of the soybean pod gall midge, Asphondylia yushimai (Diptera: Cecidomyiidae) in Japan. Applied Entomology and Zoology. 2005. https://doi.org/10.1303/aez.2005.597.