Author: Pensoft Editorial Team

Organisms living on small islands are particularly threatened by extinction. However, data are often lacking to objectively assess these threats. A team of German and British researchers used satellite imagery to assess the conservation status of endangered reptiles and amphibians of the Comoro archipelago in the Western Indian Ocean. The researchers used their results to point out which species are most threatened and to define priorities for future protected areas. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

A typical problem in species conservation efforts, particularly in tropical regions, is the lack of information on the extent of suitable habitat available for threatened species. "The analysis of satellite images allows us to precisely estimate the remaining extent of rainforest and other natural habitats," says Oliver Hawlitschek from the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology. This approach has rarely been used in species conservation, and this is the first time that it is applied to all species of a group in an entire country.

In addition to their satellite imagery analyses, the researchers conducted intensive field surveys in order to detect the habitat preferences of the reptiles. "We found that only 9% of the island area is still covered by natural forest, but many native species have adapted to habitats under human influence like orchards, plantations, and gardens", Hawlitschek says. "Those species which are dependent on the remaining natural habitats are the ones most threatened by extinction".

This research was conducted in collaboration with Bristol Conservation and Science Foundation’s (BCSF) project in the Comoros. "This collaboration has provided an exciting piece of research for the Comoros. Our project will be using this knowledge and data in combination with our research on birds, reptiles, butterflies, and species of conservation importance to guide our conservation actions which are working towards protecting the remaining forests and threatened species of Anjouan", says Katie Green, Head of Ecological Research and Monitoring, BCSF.

The researchers chose the Comoros as a case study for their methodology because, in relation to large islands like neighbouring Madagascar or continental regions, these islands cover little area and are inhabited by a limited number of species. However, they hope that their methods will also be applied to other areas, where more threatened species are concerned. "Natural habitats are destroyed at a fast pace in many regions of the world", says Frank Glaw, herpetologist at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology. "We therefore need tools to assess quickly and objectively where we have to set our priorities in species conservation, especially for species endemic to small islands which are particularly vulnerable to extinction."

Original source:
Hawlitschek O, Brückmann B, Berger J, Green K, Glaw F (2011) Integrating field surveys and remote sensing data to study distribution, habitat use and conservation status of the herpetofauna of the Comoro Islands. ZooKeys 144: 21–79 doi: 10.3897/zookeys.144.1648

Nowadays, more and more animal habitats are being fragmented, or lost. Many species need assistance and conservation of their environments to survive, and it is important to know the best way this can be achieved. A research team from France, Poland and Germany has determined two butterfly movement strategies and their relative importance.

The study is based on the Bavarian populations of Dusky Large Blue butterflies (Maculinea nausithous). The species is endangered and listed in the European Union’s Habitats Directive. The butterflies were marked with waterproof numbers on their wings, in order to be repeatedly observed. The study was published in the “Journal of Animal Ecology”.

A large part of the movements are made over relatively small distances of a few hundred meters. There were, however, a few individuals (around 2.5%) that travel several kilometres. These movements are used for conservation analyses, because they are important for landscape level effects. The methodology of the shown approach will help with improving future analysis of similar data, where until now no distinction has been made between long and short distance movements.

More efficient and better recommendations for landscape configuration and design, as well as better conservation methods can be expected from gaining information on the portion of the individuals travelling the long distance. We see this study as a major achievement in this field.

Original source:
Thomas Hovestadt, Birgit Binzenhöfer, Piotr Nowicki, Josef Settele: Do all inter-patch movements represent dispersal? A mixed kernel study of butterfly mobility in fragmented landscapes. Journal of Animal Ecology 80: 1070–1077. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2656.2011.01848.x

Additional information:
This work has been carried out within the EU projects SCALES (FP7 grant 226852), MacMan (FP5 grant EVK2-CT-2001-00126), and CLIMIT (FP6 BiodivERsA Eranet grant funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the French ANR) as well as Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education project N N304 064139.

Coneheads (or Protura) collected from all over the territory of Italy were studied by three researchers of Genoa University (Loris Galli, Matteo Capurro and Carlo Torti). 40 species have been identified (belonging to 8 genera and 4 families), 6 of which are new records for the Italian fauna. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Coneheads (or Protura) is a group of primitive “insects” whose first species (Acerentomon doderoi) was discovered in 1907 by the famous Italian zoologist Filippo Silvestri, among the small animals collected by the coleopterologist Agostino Dodero from soil samples, taken from the grounds of a small villa in the center of Genoa, Italy. In the two following years Antonio Berlese, another very important zoologist (friend/foe of Silvestri) analyzed the morphology and anatomy of these strange and still poorly known soil-borne organisms and described a few other new species.

Normally less than 2 mm long, uncolored or pale yellow colored, eyeless, using their well developed forelegs as sense organs (they lack even the antennae) while they slowly walk between soil’s grains, the Coneheads are strongly adapted to their life in soil, litter and mosses where they eat meanly hyphae, contributing to the processes of organic matter degradation and so participating in recycling the nutrients in their ecosystems.

More than a century after their discovery, in the same town they have been collected the first time, the researchers summarize the knowledge of these animals in Italy, their “native” country. They identified 40 species (belonging to 8 genera and 4 families), 6 of which are new records for the Italian fauna, but it is very likely that many other have yet to be discovered.

The authors created also a taxonomic key to identify the Italian species and drew their distribution maps. Their survey will facilitate further work by zoologists, ecologists and soil scientists and contributes to the knowledge of the Italian biodiversity.

Original source:
Galli L, Capurro M, Torti C (2011) Protura of Italy, with a key to species and their distribution. ZooKeys 146: 19–67. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.146.1885

Recent findings of researchers from the North-Eastern Hill University, India show that C. indica occupies a special taxonomic position as reflected from the Karyomorphological data generated by them. The study was published in the open-access journal Comparative Cytogenetics.

A group of enthusiastic cytogeneticists (Marlykynti Hynniewta, Surendra Kumar Malik and Satyawada Rama Rao) from North Eastern Hill University show that C. indica occupies a special taxonomic position, as reflected in the karyomorphological data.

The genus Citrus is an economically important horticultural crop known for its fruit and juice. In India, there are about 30 species of Citrus of which at least nine species are available throughout India, while 17 species are confined to the North-Eastern states of India, which have been classified as a hot spot for Citrus biodiversity  and are threatened in their natural habitat as per the criteria fixed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). Seven Indian Citrus species are considered endangered or nearly so, including C. Indica, C. macroptera, C. latipes, C. assamensis, C. ichangensis, C. megaloxycarpa and C. rugulosa.

C. indica (Tanaka, 1937) is supposed to be the most primitive species and perhaps the progenitor of cultivated Citrus. From the karyomorphological data it can be observed that the asymmetry index of different species of Citrus presently investigated had shown significant variation. C. medica, C. grandis and C. reticulata which are considered as true basic species are characteristic in having low asymmetry index of 1.87, 1.89 and 2.46 respectively.  In the present investigation, the data from the karyomorphological observations on chromosome complements in 10 different Citrus species reflect that C. indica with its intermediate asymmetry index value (1.94) may be regarded as a true progenitor of cultivated Citrus. This study also supports the previous report that there are three true species of Citrus, viz. C. grandis, C. reticulata and C. medica.

Additional information:
The present work was carried out in the Department of Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong and was supported by University Grants Commission, New Delhi through scholarship.
A part of this research work was presented as a paper in National Symposium on Biodiversity Assessment, Conservation and Value Addition organised by School of Life Science (UPE-Biosciences) North-Eastern Hill University on 17th-19th March, 2011. pp 32.

Original source:
Hynniewta M, Malik SK, Rao SR (2011) Karyological studies in ten species of Citrus (Linnaeus, 1753) (Rutaceae) of North-East India. Comparative Cytogenetics 5(4): 19–29. doi: 10.3897/CompCytogen.v5i4.1796

An international team from the Zoological institute RAS (St Petersburg) and the Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research, BAS (Sofia) showed that true bugs differed from the majority of other insects in molecular composition of telomeres. The study was published in Comparative Cytogenetics.

In the 1930s B. McClintock from the University of Missouri, Columbia and H.J. Muller from the University of Edinburgh discovered (independently of one another) that chromosomes carry special components, or “telomeres”, which stabilize their structure and protect them from destruction. At present, it is known, that telomeres regulate cellular senescence (the cellular equivalent of aging) and their shortening plays the role of a molecular clock for the organism.

In most animal and plants, the telomeres consist of short DNA tandem motifs (repeated millions of times) and associated proteins. Comparative analysis of these motifs in various groups of organisms has showed that they are evolutionarily stable being invariant within a group.

The most common and (most probably) ancestral DNA motif of insect telomeres is known to be (TTAGG)n. Some Authors suggested the absence of this motif in true bugs (a large group of insects, among them bedbugs, firebugs, and significant agricultural pests) however this conclusion was based on available data, which are very scarce.

On the basis of the results obtained in several phylogenetically distant species studied by FISH (a technique for visualizing specific DNA sequences onto chromosomes) and dot-blot hybridization (a technique for detecting the presence/absence of target biomolecules in a sample) with a TTAGG probe, we confirmed that the insect consensus telomeric motif (TTAGG)n was lost in the evolution of true bugs.

To clarify the molecular composition of telomeres in these insects we used dot-blot hybridization of the genomic DNA from several true bug species with a number of telomeric probes known as specific to other organisms (ciliates, nematodes, shrimps, vertebrates, and plants). The result of these hybridization experiments was negative allowing suggesting that these telomerase-depended sequences are likewise not characteristic of the true bug telomeres.

Hence, the question of the molecular composition of true bug telomeres remains open and needs further studies.

Original source:
Grozeva S, Kuznetsova VG, Anokhin BA (2011) Karyotypes, male meiosis and comparative FISH mapping of 18S ribosomal DNA and telomeric (TTAGG)n repeat in eight species of true bugs (Hemiptera, Heteroptera). Comparative Cytogenetics 5(4): 355–374. doi: 10.3897/CompCytogen.v5i4.2307

Contact:
Snejana Grozeva
Tel (+359 2) 9885115
E-mail: sgrozeva@yahoo.com
 

A list of 235 planthoppers from Iran is recorded along with distribution data. This list is based on previous studies on Iranian Auchenorrhyncha during last 100 years. In addition to the latest species names for any record, new combinations and the transferring one species at family level is proposed. The study was published in the open access journal Zookeys.

Planthoppers are studied relatively little, but are both economically important (they cause reduced crop yield through their feeding, oviposition and transferring pathogen microorganisms to a wide range of plants) and very interesting from a biodiversity aspect.

In a new published paper, the first complete list of Fulgoromorpha species recorded from Iran has been compiled, which is based on literature records and the addition of some new taxonomic data. The list consists of 235 species while nearly half of them are endemic from Iran. Iranissus ephedinus Dlabola, 1980 is transferred from Issidae to Nogodinidae. To resolve nomenclatural difficulty the following new combinations in Family Issidae are given: Iranodus dumetorus (Dlabola, 1981), Iranodus khatunus (Dlabola, 1981) and Iranodus repandus (Dlabola, 1981). Due to published generic synonomy the following are new combinations: Duilius seticulosus (Lethierry, 1874), D. tamaricis (Puton & Lethierry, 1887), D. tamaricicola (Dubovsky, 1966) D. vatrum (Dlabola, 1985). It is hoped that this list will encourage further studies on this important group of insects and also improve the view in practical fields such as pest control management.

Original source:
Mozaffarian F, Wilson MR (2011) An annotated checklist of the planthoppers of Iran (Hemiptera, Auchenorrhyncha, Fulgoromorpha) with distribution data. ZooKeys 145: 1-57. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.145.1846

Aphid researchers from Chinese Academy of Sciences found one new species, Aleurodaphis sinojackiae Qiao & Jiang, 2011 from Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces, China. It forms leaf galls on Jack trees (Sinojackia xylocarpa) and is one of two known gall makers in the plant lice Aleurodaphis (Hemiptera, Aphididae, Hormaphidinae). The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Aleurodaphis was established in 1917 by van der Goot and has eight known species in the world, restricted to China, Japan, India and Indonesia. Its remarkable characteristics are the followings, body of apterae is similar to nymphs of mealywing, frontal horn is absent and wax glands are arranged along crenulated margin of body.

The range of its host plants is quite wide, but  only two of them can form leaf galls on the host plants, A. sinojackiae and A. stewartiae. The new species was named after its host plant, Jack trees (Sinojackia xylocarpa). It induced the leaves of host plants to curl and form leaf galls.

The most typical characteristic of the new species is that wax glands are arranged on each segment of body not connecting with each other in apterae, while arranged continuously along the edge of body as a crenulation in the other known species of the genus.

Aleurodaphis sinisalicis Zhang, 1982 was confirmed as a synonym with A. blumeae van der Goot, 1917 after checking the type specimens.

The holotype and some paratypes of the new species are deposited in British Natural History Museum, London, UK (BMNH), while the other paratypes in the National Zoological Museum of China, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China (NZMC) and Kôgakkan University, Japan.

Original source:
Jiang LY, Qiao GX (2011) A review of Aleurodaphis (Hemiptera, Aphididae, Hormaphidinae) with the description of one new species and keys to species. ZooKeys 135: 41–56. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.135.1721

Wiki version:
http://species-id.net/wiki/Aleurodaphis
http://species-id.net/wiki/Aleurodaphis_sinojackiae

 

A new minute freshwater snail species belonging to the genus Daphniola was found by a researcher from University of Athens (Canella Radea) in a spring covered by snow on Mt. Parnassos, central Greece. This study was published in the open access journal Zookeys.

The new species, Daphniola eptalophos, has a transparent conical-flat coiled shell, grey-black pigmented soft body and a black penis with a small colorless outgrowth on the left side near its base. D. eptalophos differs from its congeners in shell dimensions, soft body pigmentation and coloration of penis.

Daphniola is an endemic genus for Greece, inhabiting most of mainland Greece. Two of the three currently known species are included in the category Endangered and Critically Endangered in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2011.1. It is notable that D. eptalophos was found in only one spring until now and its population abundance seems to be low.

The new species could be threatened by habitat destruction because the localities of freshwater gastropods in Greece, most of them springs, are prone to changes due to urbanization, water pollution, waste accumulation, tourism and agricultural practices. Effective conservation measures must be urgently taken to protect these localities before their unique gastropod fauna disappears.

Original source:
Radea C (2011) A new species of hydrobiid snails (Mollusca, Gastropoda, Hydrobiidae) from central Greece. ZooKeys 138: 53-64. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.138.1927

Through an examination of collections, both natural and experimental rearings, and DNA sequence data, three nominal species of ichneumon wasps, having very different morphologies and hitherto regarded as distinct, are shown to be seasonal forms of a single species, Scambus calobatus.

Three widely differing forms of European Scambus parasitoid wasps that had previously been regarded as distinct species are shown to be seasonal morphs of a single species. The collaboration involved National Museums Scotland (Mark Shaw), a private individual (Malcolm Jennings) as well as Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum (Donald Quicke). It was published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research, an open access journal.

The findings depended on examination of museum collections with good data standards, targeted fieldwork to rear specimens from known hosts at different times of year, and experimental rearings of progeny from spring females through summer hosts. DNA sequence data provided confirmation that the rearing results were real, and not the result of overlooked contaminants.

The adults of these parasitoids paralyse their concealed hosts, which are small caterpillars or beetle larvae, before laying an egg beside the host. The host remains paralysed and is consumed by the resulting parasitoid larva, which then pupates and eventually becomes an adult, emerging from the same place. One morph (“S. planatus”: Fig. 1), which occurs in spring, has a robust head to accommodate the powerful muscles needed to chew out of acorns in which it has been a parasitoid of micromoth and weevil larvae attacked the previous autumn. Females of this morph live for several weeks, during which they become darker and their abdomen broadens considerably (“S. ventricosus”). Towards the middle of summer, this morph matures its eggs and parasitises micromoth larvae living in relatively soft silken retreats among foliage. Within a few weeks, adults of the next generation emerge from this substrate, having much less powerful heads (“S. calobatus”: Fig. 2), and these adults then seek tenanted acorns in which to oviposit in autumn. The spring-emerging and summer-emerging forms also differ in their ovipositor lengths. This life-cycle was confirmed experimentally by allowing the S. ventricosus morph, originating from acorns, to parasitise the summer hosts which then produced adults of the S. calobatus morph. Because S. calobatus is the oldest of the three names, this is the one that has to be used for this seasonally variable, but none-the-less single, species in the future.

“It was satisfying to be able to follow this hunch through to such a conclusive result” says the senior author Mark Shaw. “It shows the importance of good collections, careful field work, and focussed experimentation. Almost certainly there will be other similar cases.”

Original source:
Shaw MR, Jennings MT, Quicke DLJ (2011) The identity of Scambus planatus (Hartig, 1838) and Scambus ventricosus (Tschek, 1871) as seasonal forms of Scambus calobatus (Gravenhorst, 1829) in Europe (Hymenoptera, Ichneumonidae, Pimplinae, Ephialtini). Journal of Hymenoptera Research 23: 55-64. doi:10.3897/JHR.23.1974

Cave millipedes of the genus Tetracion are found on the southern Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee and Alabama, USA. New genetic analyses show that their populations are generally isolated and genetically distinct. Genetic divergence between two species of Tetracion suggests they diverged several million years ago. The study was published in the open access journal International Journal of Myriadopology.

This week the International Journal of Myriapodology published the first population genetic study of cave millipedes. This research highlights an important challenge in the conservation of cave biodiversity – that for many species caves are ‘islands’ of habitat that support isolated and genetically distinct populations.

The southern Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee and Alabama, USA is known for its high cave density. In addition, it has the highest cave biodiversity of any region in North America. Millipedes of the genus Tetracion range across this biodiversity hotspot. These millipedes, which can grow up to 8 cm in length, are common scavengers in cave communities. Like many cave animals, Tetracion millipedes have reduced pigmentation and non-functional eyes.

The authors used genetic techniques to compare Tetracion populations and species. They found that Tetracion populations were generally isolated from one another. In addition, divergence between Tetracion species was high, suggesting that members of the genus diverged several million years ago.

Original Source:
Loria, S.F., K.S. Zigler and J.J. Lewis. 2011. Molecular phylogeography of the troglobiotic millipede Tetracion Hoffman, 1956 (Diplopoda: Callipodida: Abacionidae). International Journal of Myriapodology 5:35-48. doi: 10.3897/ijm.5.1891