Mesosoma
Anthropod body part
The mesosoma is the middle part of the body, or tagma, of arthropods whose body is composed of three parts, the other two being the prosoma and the metasoma. It bears the legs, and, in the case of winged insects, the wings.
01Wasps, bees and ants
In hymenopterans of the suborder Apocrita (wasps, bees and ants), the mesosoma consists of the three thoracic segments and the first abdominal segment (the propodeum). For historical reasons, in ants it is commonly referred to by the alternative name alitrunk.
02Arachnids
In scorpions, the mesosoma is composed of six segments and forms the first part of the abdomen, containing all of the major organs. The first segment contains the sexual organs as well as a pair of vestigial and modified appendages forming a structure called the genital operculum. The second segment bears a pair of featherlike sensory organs known as the pectines; the final four segments each contain a pair of book lungs. The mesosoma is armoured with chitinous plates, on the upper surface by the tergites and on the lower surface by the sternites.
In other arachnids such as spiders, the mesosoma is fused with the metasoma to form the opisthosoma.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Mesosoma”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Scorpion anatomy.png by No machine-readable author provided. Pasixxxx assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain
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