Comparison of five methods for delimitating species in Ophion Fabricius, a diverse genus of parasitoid wasps (Hymenoptera, Ichneumonidae).

Abstract

DNA taxonomy has been proposed as a method to quickly assess diversity and species limits in highly diverse, understudied taxa. Here we use five methods for species delimitation and two genetic markers (COI and ITS2) to assess species diversity within the parasitoid genus, Ophion. We searched for compensatory base changes (CBC's) in ITS2, and determined that they are too rare to be of practical use in delimiting species in this genus. The other four methods used both COI and ITS2, and included distance-based (threshold analysis and ABGD) and tree-based (GMYC and PTP) models. We compared the results of these analyses to each other under various parameters and tested their performance with respect to 11 Nearctic species/morphospecies and 15 described Palearctic species. We also computed barcode accumulation curves of COI sequences to assess the completeness of sampling. The species count was highly variable depending on the method and parameters used, ranging from 47 to 168 species, with more conservative estimates of 89-121 species. Despite this range, many of the Nearctic test species were fairly robust with respect to method. We concluded that while there was often good congruence between methods, GMYC and PTP were less reliant on arbitrary parameters than the other two methods and more easily applied to genetic markers other than COI. However, PTP was less successful at delimiting test species than was GMYC. All methods, as well as the barcode accumulation curves, indicate that several Palearctic species remain undescribed and that we have scarcely begun to appreciate the Nearctic diversity within this genus.