With a little help from my… bacteria

excerpt is from the blog Cunabulum

…Less frequently realized is a bacterial relationship of another kind: symbiosis. Perhaps by now, more than 40 years after Lynn Margulis‘ stunning work popularizing it, the endosymbiotic theory of the origins of many organelles within the eukaryotic cell, including mitochondria and chloroplasts, is widely understood enough to continue without comment. But briefly, there is a heap of undeniable evidence that many of the eukaryote’s organelles were once free-living bacteria that were engulfed and put to work by other cells: mitochondria respire, chloroplasts photosynthesize. It is reasonable to assume other such relationships exist within certain lineages of eukaryotes.

So here we have leafhoppers, like many other insects including aphids, feed almost exclusively on the phloem or xylem fluid of plants. With such a restricted diet, you are bound to run into nutritional deficiencies. Syrup is tasty, but I wouldn’t want to subsist solely on it! What’s an insect to do? The clear answer is to harvest those little nutrient-producing biological machines known as bacteria…

more via Endosymbiotic Bacteria in Leafhoppers