Revision of the neotropical genus Sendaphne Nixon (Hymenoptera, Braconidae, Microgastrinae)

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

The Neotropical genus of parasitoid wasps Sendaphne (Hymenoptera, Braconidae, Microgastrinae) is revised and the following six new species are described, all authored by Fernández-Triana and Whitfield: anitae, bennetti, broadi, dianariaspennae, penteadodiasae, and rogerblancoi. The greatest species richness is found in northern South America, but the genus extends north to 23° N in Mexico. Most species have been collected in rainforest below altitudes of 900 m, with only a few species found in cloud forests up to 1900 m. Nothing is known of the host caterpillars for these parasitoid wasps.

Related collections

Most cited references 8

Record: found
Abstract: not found
Article: not found

An inexpensive, automation-friendly protocol for recovering high-quality DNA

Natalia V. Ivanova, Jeremy deWaard, Paul Hebert (2006)

0 comments Cited 428 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Extreme diversity of tropical parasitoid wasps exposed by iterative integration of natural history, DNA barcoding, morphology, and collections.

M. Alex Smith, Josephine J. Rodriguez, James B. Whitfield … (2008)

We DNA barcoded 2,597 parasitoid wasps belonging to 6 microgastrine braconid genera reared from parapatric tropical dry forest, cloud forest, and rain forest in Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG) in northwestern Costa Rica and combined these data with records of caterpillar hosts and morphological analyses. We asked whether barcoding and morphology discover the same provisional species and whether the biological entities revealed by our analysis are congruent with wasp host specificity. Morphological analysis revealed 171 provisional species, but barcoding exposed an additional 142 provisional species; 95% of the total is likely to be undescribed. These 313 provisional species are extraordinarily host specific; more than 90% attack only 1 or 2 species of caterpillars out of more than 3,500 species sampled. The most extreme case of overlooked diversity is the morphospecies Apanteles leucostigmus. This minute black wasp with a distinctive white wing stigma was thought to parasitize 32 species of ACG hesperiid caterpillars, but barcoding revealed 36 provisional species, each attacking one or a very few closely related species of caterpillars. When host records and/or within-ACG distributions suggested that DNA barcoding had missed a species-pair, or when provisional species were separated only by slight differences in their barcodes, we examined nuclear sequences to test hypotheses of presumptive species boundaries and to further probe host specificity. Our iterative process of combining morphological analysis, ecology, and DNA barcoding and reiteratively using specimens maintained in permanent collections has resulted in a much more fine-scaled understanding of parasitoid diversity and host specificity than any one of these elements could have produced on its own.

0 comments Cited 235 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

DNA barcodes reveal cryptic host-specificity within the presumed polyphagous members of a genus of parasitoid flies (Diptera: Tachinidae).

M A Smith, N. Woodley, D. Janzen … (2006)

Insect parasitoids are a major component of global biodiversity and affect the population dynamics of their hosts. However, identification of insect parasitoids is often difficult, and they are suspected to contain many cryptic species. Here, we ask whether the cytochrome c oxidase I DNA barcode could function as a tool for species identification and discovery for the 20 morphospecies of Belvosia parasitoid flies (Diptera: Tachinidae) that have been reared from caterpillars (Lepidoptera) in Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), northwestern Costa Rica. Barcoding not only discriminates among all 17 highly host-specific morphospecies of ACG Belvosia, but it also raises the species count to 32 by revealing that each of the three generalist species are actually arrays of highly host-specific cryptic species. We also identified likely hybridization among Belvosia by using a variable internal transcribed spacer region 1 nuclear rDNA sequence as a genetic covariate in addition to the strategy of overlaying barcode clusters with ecological information. If general, these results will increase estimates of global species richness and imply that tropical conservation and host-parasite interactions may be more complex than expected.