Hyperparasitoid wasps (Hymenoptera, Trigonalidae) reared from dry forest and rain forest caterpillars of Area de Conservación Guanacaste, Costa Rica

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Abstract

Five species of Trigonalidae, hyperparasitoids of Ichneumonidae (Hymenoptera) and Tachinidae (Diptera) that parasitize caterpillars (Lepidoptera), have been reared during the ongoing caterpillar inventory of Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), Guanacaste Province, northwestern Costa Rica: Lycogaster apicipennis (Cameron), Taeniogonalos woodorum Smith, sp. n., Taeniogonalos fasciatipennis (Cameron), Trigonalys championi Cameron, and Trigonalys maculifrons Sharp. Morphological and DNA barcoding data support species separation of these generalist hyperparasitoids. Taeniogonalos gundlachii (Cresson) is not a widespread, color-variable species as previously treated and is probably confined to eastern North America. The species previously considered as T. gundlachii in Costa Rica is regarded as Taeniogonalos fasciatipennis, a species found only in ACG dry forest. Taeniogonalos woodorum is a similar species but found only in the ACG rain forest. Habitat and host records are given for these five species of trigonalids.

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

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

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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.

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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.