When Dietmar Schwarz jogged along the Blue Course golf course one summer night, a fruit bush infested with maggots caught his attentive eye, causing the biologist in him to take over.

"The previous summer I had worked with a fly that infested a related plant, so this was right on my radar," Schwarz said. "It made me curious."

Over the next eight years, Schwarz, a post-doctoral researcher in entomology at Penn State, along with a four-person research team, studied the maggots at Penn State research facilities.

Schwarz said the maggots -- which become flies in their adult stage -- may be a new hybrid species of the tephritid fruit fly, which suggests that hybridization is more common in the animal kingdom than previously believed. Schwarz added that with plants, more than 50 percent of new species are hybrid.

"There is a problem in explaining how all the diversity in the animal kingdom came about," Schwarz said. "But out of hybridization we do get a new lineage."

The new fruit fly, which is tentatively being called the Lonicera fly, is a fruit parasite that is dependent on its host plant, the Asian honeysuckle bush. It exists because of the interbreeding, or breeding outside of the species, of the blueberry maggot (R. mendax) and the snowberry maggot (R. zephyria). This results in a hybrid species.

Bruce A. McPheron, professor of entomology and associate dean for research, who also worked on the project, said the Asian honeysuckle is an invasive plant, meaning that it is non-native and spreads aggressively by forcing out other plants in the area.

"The Lonicera fly is not an agricultural threat," McPheron said. "It won't control the honeysuckle population or affect farmers."

McPheron said they traced the lineage of the Lonicera fly and proved it was a new species by looking into its genetic structure.

"The Lonicera contains the genetic attributes of both parents and its own, unique genetic attributes," McPheron said.

Ke Chug Kim, professor of entomology and director of Penn State center for Biodiversity Research, said that whenever one species dominates, the environment suffers.

"Reducing bio-diversity reduces not only the native species but also the bio-diversity at large," Kim said.

Schwarz said it was "ironic" that by

the creation of a new species, there could potentially be a total loss for the overall species.

"The Asian honeysuckle could create more of a mono-culture," Schwarz said, "which is aesthetically unpleasing."

Schwarz said flies within the Rhagoletis pomonella species complex, such as the Blueberry, the Snowberry and now the Lonicera, have a tendency to mate on their host plant.

"It is likely that the induction of the plant created an empty ecological niche for the fly," Schwarz said. "This made it reproductively isolated from the parent species."

Schwarz said this prevents large-scale crossbreeding between the species, which would result in blending the genes together into one.

Nicole Shakir-Botteri, a now-graduated biology major who worked on the project, said that since the Asian honeysuckle is rapidly spreading, this would likely result in more of the Lonicera fly.

"But if the [honeysuckle] bush were to go, the fly would go with it," Shakir-Botteri said.