Within New World Chrysomelinae, reports of subsociality until recently were limited to a single species studied at the La Selva Field station in the Atlantic lowlands of Costa Rica (Choe 1989). However a misidentification of that species (not by the author) lead to erroneous attribution of subsocial behavior to Labidomera suturalis, rather than to an unidentified species of Platyphora. The species was subsequently described and named Platyphora selva by Daccordi without comments on Choe’s behavioral observations (Daccordi 1993). As noted by Reid et al. (2009), this first record of subsocial behavior in Neotropical chrysomelines led to a number of reports citing the original paper and repeating the taxonomic error (e.g. Windsor and Choe 1994, Kudô and Hasegawa 2003, Costa 2006).

Choe (1989) observed 18 guarding Platyphora selva females in two different years, all feeding on Lycianthes (Witheringia) heteroclita Sendtm. (Solanaceae) in the Atlantic lowlands of Costa Rica. His observations were remarkable in first describing how females of this species tightly guarded offspring by straddling. By removing mothers from roughly half of the families, he was able to demonstrate that guarding was highly effective in preventing predation by the gigantic ponerine ant, Paraponera clavata Fab. The importance of maternal defenses in reducing losses to parasitoids, however, was not investigated. Further, it was noted that mothers always guarded groups of four or fewer larvae; but eggs of the beetle were never observed during the study. From observations of related taxa (see below) we now suspect that Platyphora selva is not oviparous, but instead deposits temporally isolated clutches of four larvae. This inference remains to be documented and is based on the habits of the morphologically similar species, Platyphora microspina, which occurs widely (but rarely) in neighboring Panama. Regrettably, sequence data are not yet available for Platyphora selva.