
Joppeicus paradoxus is a predatory heteropteran bug and the only member of the genus Joppeicus and the family Joppeicidae. Adults are ~3 mm long.
Joppeicus paradoxus is a predatory heteropteran bug and the only member of the genus Joppeicus and the family Joppeicidae. Adults are ~3 mm long.
==Taxonomy== The species was described in 1881 and was initially placed in the Aradidae, later moved to the Lygaeidae (by Bergroth in 1898). In 1954 it was moved to the Cimicomorpha and the family was erected in 1910. The features of the group are a median longitudinal carina on the pronotum and the forewing venation. A molecular genetics study in 2022 recovered Joppeicidae within Cimicomorpha as the closest relative of family Microphysidae, forming together the clade Microphysoidea. Another study in 2023 recovered Joppeicidae as the earliest diverging group of Cimiciformes.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).