Braggia Gillette & Palmer

Up until 2009, this genus was poorly studied, with species that were undescribed and others difficult to recognize.  My long-time colleague Keith Pike at Washington State University led an effort to describe some new species and to write a key to species.  These aphids live on Eriogonum, commonly known as wild buckwheats.  The genus is related to Aphis.

For many years I had been puzzled by the placement of these aphids in their own genus when they are basically Aphis with short siphunculi that live on Eriogonum. Then in 2023 I found the type species of the genus, Braggia echinata Gillette and Palmer on an Eriogonum here in western Colorado. Once slide-mounted, these specimens made it obvious why this genus was established in 1929 — the cauda is almost imperceptible. In fact, when examining the first several specimens, I thought that I had somehow ripped off all the caudas during slide mounting. Palmer (1952) describes the cauda of this species as, “Cauda broadly semi-circular to triangular resembling a body segment.” An apt description. Anyhow, now I understand that the genus was created for this very unusual species and then other Eriogonum-feeding Aphis-like species were added to it based on biological and morphological similarities apart from the cauda.

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Braggia columbiana Pike

This is one of the Braggia species recently described by Keith Pike. Before Keith’s paper, I did not file Braggia with species names in my collection, preferring to leave the specimens with only genus name. His paper brought the situation into a lot better order. Probably I should take more photos of Braggia, as I have collected 5 species but only have photos of one of them. I have samples of B. columbiana from the Columbia River gorge area of Washington and Oregon, plus one sample from central Washington.