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A research in the North Caucasus, conducted by a group of Russian scientists over three years, has revealed an intermediate distribution of Caucasian populations of non-biting midges between Europe and Siberia. Their observations also proved some interesting morphological distinctions between the studied populations and the previously researched ones from Europe and Siberia. Their results have been published in the open-access journal Comparative Cytogenetics.

The study on karyotypical and morphological peculiarities of Ch. bernensis is a part of the investigation of the fauna and distribution of non-biting midges in the Northern Caucasus.

“Non-biting midges is a very interesting group of insects,” said Dr. Karmokov, senior staff scientist in Tembotov Institute of Ecology of Mountain territories. “The fauna and distribution of many species are still almost unknown. We investigated the species Ch. bernensis of the genus Chironomus, observed by us in northern Caucasus for the first time. We found interesting distinctions in the morphology of the mouthparts of larvae, as well as new, not previously known for this species, rearrangement in the second chromosome.”

The genus Chironomus is one of the most well-studied groups of non-biting midges. It consists of over 200 species. Dr. Karmokov explained that on comparing the populations from Caucasus with the already studied ones from Europe and Siberia, they found similarities between the Caucasian and the European. However, the former was occupying a special intermediate location, which might indicate a fairly large degree of isolation.

“The dominance of different genotypic combinations at various sites of the Caucasus probably can be explained by the fact that in some areas some combinations can be more adaptive than the others,” the scientists suggest. “Perhaps this is happening due to a different level of mineralization, temperature and degree of eutrophication in the different collection sites.”

Although the research team points out that more researches are needed for more specific information to be obtained, they propose that the geographical location of the studied regions reflects the true course of the species’ settlement (either from west to east or from east to west). Dr. Karmokov conducted the current study with the help of Dr. Polukonova and Dr. Sinichkina from Saratov State Medical University named after V.I. Razumovsky.

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Original source:

Karmokov MKh, Polukonova NV, Sinichkina OV (2015) Karyotype characteristics and polymorphism peculiarities of Chironomus bernensis Wülker & Klötzli, 1973 (Diptera, Chironomidae) from the Central Caucasus and Ciscaucasia. Comparative Cytogenetics 9(3): 281-297. doi: 10.3897/CompCytogen.v9i3.4519

Researchers Ullmann and Stachowitsch critically review the current state of sea turtle rescue centres and first-aid stations in relation to the mortality trends for two charismatic yet endangered flagship species – the Mediterranean loggerhead and green turtle populations. Their findings were published in the open-access journal Nature Conservation.

The authors emphasise an urgent need for additional and more evenly spread turtle rescue centres and first-aid stations. They also call for improving communication and collaboration among existing centres to form a tightly knit rescue network spanning the entire Mediterranean.

The research team points out that while countries such as Italy, Greece and Spain have a fair number of rescue centres and first-aid stations, others have no facilities at all. For a number of countries no official data on this issue were available.

Sea turtles are highly migratory by nature and face a range of human-induced threats at sea and on land.A disturbing fact, featured in the review, is a bycatch rate of up to 200,000 loggerheads per year, leading to more than 50,000 deaths through direct interaction alone. The authors point out that because sea turtles grow slowly and reach sexual maturity late in their lives, every adult is extremely important.

This is precisely where the role of rescue centers grasps: every rescued individual counts. The research team provides a list of over 40 rescue institutions with contact details as a starting point for a common online database to connect existing centres and to inform potential volunteers where their valuable help is most needed.

“Proposals similar to ours have been previously advanced. The Regional Activity Centre for Specially Protected Areas, for example, has suggested building a Mediterranean-wide rescue network, but unfortunately it has never been realized in the envisioned scope.” commented Ullmann from the Department of Arctic and Marine Biology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway. “With the current worrying trends, however, action should not be delayed until further evidence has been collected. A functioning network of sea turtle rescue centers would be a good first step in this direction.”

A team of scientists, led by Dr. Tremaine Gregory from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, worked with a pipeline construction company to preserve the branches of large trees that connected over the pipeline clearing forming natural canopy bridges in the Lower Urubamba Region of Peru. For a year, the researchers used camera traps in the bridges to monitor their use, and it didn’t take long for an unexpected animal to appear in the photographs: a tiny porcupine weighing just 770g. Curiously, the small mammals appeared to be unable to leap across canopy gaps, choosing only well-connected bridges. The finding was published in the open-access journal ZooKeys, and funding and logistical support for this canopy bridge study were provided by Repsol Exploración Perú.

Similar to a road, a natural gas pipeline clearing in the tropical forest presents a problem for arboreal animals, like monkeys, whose paws never touch the ground. They need to either take a chance and dare to cross the clearing on the ground or remain safely in the canopy while losing access to the resources on the other side. The researchers decided to test the utility of a solution to this problem: natural canopy bridges.

“When my colleague, Farah Carrasco-Rueda, and I saw this species for the first time in the camera trap photos, we were confused,” said Dr. Gregory. “The animals were much smaller than the species known to exist in the area, but they didn’t seem to be youngsters.”

Because no dwarf porcupines are known to the region, as the bridge monitoring project came to a close, the researchers opted to collect one individual. After a careful identification process, they determined that the animals belong to a species known to exist only as far south as Iquitos, Peru, 900 km to the north.

The camera trap photos revealed the species not only to be present but also to be quite abundant, with 17 individuals revealed in the photos. This species was described just over a decade ago, and previously, knowledge of the species came from only 5 specimens collected over the past century, while behavioral information could only be deduced from a single live specimen observed. However, in this study, the researchers found camera trapping to be a successful method to study them, with the porcupines even developing an apparent affinity for the cameras.

“At one point we began to have problems with the cameras. When we checked them, we found many of them opened and exposed to the tropical weather. After reviewing the photos, we realized it was the porcupines inadvertently opening them when they came to gnaw on them!”

The behavioral information gathered in this study from over 2,000 camera trap photos provides new insight into the lives of these tiny, spiny creatures.

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Original source:

Gregory T, Lunde D, Zamora-Meza HT, Carrasco-Rueda F (2015) Records of Coendou ichillus(Rodentia, Erethizontidae) from the Lower Urubamba Region of Peru. ZooKeys 509: 109-121. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.509.9821

Researchers from the California Academy of Sciences (Rick Overson and Brian Fisher) have described six new species of strange subterranean ants from the genus Prionopelta in Madagascar and Seychelles.

Members of the ant genus Prionopelta are fierce, social predators that hunt down their prey with dagger-like teeth. These ants live throughout the tropics of the world, but usually go completely unnoticed for two main reasons.

Firstly, they are tiny. The smallest of the newly described species makes a fruit fly look huge. At 1.5 mm in length and 0.2 mm wide it is a barely visible fleck, skinnier even than the diameter of some single-celled protozoa.

Secondly, they lead an extremely cryptic lifestyle. Unlike many ants that are seen marching around at picnics, Prionopelta are either subterranean or live deep within leaf litter on the rainforest floor – some never catch a glimpse of sunlight their entire lives.

In keeping with their dark and mysterious habits, Prionopelta are part of a larger group of ants that have been dubbed Dracula ants by Fisher, as they are known to engage in the strange behavior of wounding the young of the colony and drinking their blood–more correctly called hemolymph in insects–as a bizarre means of distributing nutrients throughout the colony.

All of the newly described species of Prionopelta are endemic to the Malagasy region: six from Madagascar and one known only from the islands of Seychelles. This investigation increases the total number of species in the genus from 15 to 21, and highlights Madagascar as a major center of diversity for these fascinating insects. Previously, only one species was known from Madagascar which was described in 1924.

The new discoveries are a result of intensive sampling for over a decade by Fisher and members of the Madagascar Biodiversity Center. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

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Original source:

Overson R & Fisher BL (2015) Taxonomic revision of the genus Prionopelta (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) in the Malagasy region. In: ZooKeys 507: 115-150. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.507.9303

Other references:

Ito F & Billen J (1998) Larval hemolymph feeding and oophagy: behavior of queen and workers in the primitive ponerine ant Prionopelta kraepelini (Hymenoptera, Formicidae). In: Société royale zoologique de Belgique 128: 201-209

Masuko K, (1986) Larval hemolymph feeding: a non-destructive parental cannibalism in the primitive ant Amblyopone silvestrii Wheeler (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). In: Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 19: 249-255

Ten subsocial cobweb spider species were discovered in a research on nearly 400 Madagascan colonies, conducted by Dr. Agnarsson’s team. Most of them are single forest endemics and belong to one genus, Anelosimus.

The number of newly found species in an otherwise ongoingly deforested area such as Madagascar triggers the need for additional samplings, the research team point out.

In their report the scientists also stress on the fact that the extraordinary biodiversity there is still “mostly unexplored and undescribed” in terms of “many arthropod groups, such as spiders.” The California Academy of Sciences is one of the few institutions to have thoroughly looked into Madagascan spider research.

Curiously, five of the new species bare the names of the staple figures within the field of evolutionary biology: Wallace, Huxley, Buffon, Hooker and Lamarck. The Anelosimus darwini derives its name from the father of evolutionary biology Charles Darwin himself.

Yet, another one out of the ten species, Anelosimus moramora, got its name from the Madagascan motto ‘no rush’ or ‘take it easy.’

Dr. Agnarsson led the research in the biodiversity hotspot of Madagascar on behalf of both the University of Vermont’s Biology department and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The study can be found in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

Inspired by the discovery of more than 1000 eriophyoid mite species in China so far, Dr. Ji Wei Li and his team collected mites from four different areas across the autonomous region of Xinjiang, China. A consecutive study of the samples proved the existence of three new mite species all from separate genera. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

All new species come from representatives of the rose family Rosaceae. Interestingly, one of the new mites is also the first ever representative of the genus Paracolomerus found to inhabit a Rosaceae plant.

Eriophyoid mites are so tiny that they are invisible to the naked human eye. Nevertheless, they are recognized as important pests in agriculture and forestry all over the world. They can induce plant malformations such as galls and disturb the normal growth of plants by piercing their cells with saliva.

About half of the eriophyoid mites, however, don’t cause any apparent damage to their hosts.

Such is the case with the newly discovered three species. The mites were found to infest the undersurface of the leaves of two species of flowering plants (Rosa beggeriana and Cotoneaster ignavus), without causing any apparent damage to the host.

The collected type specimens are now being kept at the Department of Plant Protection, Shihezi University, China.

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Original source:

Li J-W, Wang Z-H, Xue X-F, Zhang J-P (2015) Three new species of eriophyoid mites (Acari, Eriophyoidea) from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China. ZooKeys 508: 97-111. doi:10.3897/zookeys.508.8940

Revisiting original types and DNA analysis exposed hidden diversity in minute non-biting midges. Two species new to science were discovered and one misapprehended species was removed by following the traces back to the source in Brussels. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

“Nobody suspected a mystery until we solved it”, says Elisabeth Stur, the senior author of the paper describing the misconception. – “Maybe even some will be upset that we discovered this long lasting misidentification”.

It all started with Elisabeth Stur and Torbjørn Ekrem from the NTNU University Museumstarted to look at type material of species in the genus Gymnometriocnemus to put correct names on their Norwegian specimens. These were vouchers for DNA barcodes in the Barcode of Life Data Systems, thus correct identification was important.

“We were surprised to find that the types of one species was not at all what it was supposed to be according to current belief”, Stur says. – “They belonged to a quite different genus, but previous revisers never checked the types”. Thus, a completely wrong understanding of the species was commonly accepted among entomologists working with midges.

As a result of their investigation and DNA barcoding of midges collected through the Norwegian Taxonomy Initiative, two species new to science were also discovered.

There is little information about bee populations in Alaska, where native bee pollination is critical to the maintenance of subarctic ecosystems. A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the USDA have now completed a two-year study on bumble bees in agricultural areas in the region. The research was published in the Biodiversity Data Journal.

Pollination is one of the most fundamental processes sustaining agricultural production and natural ecosystems. While decrease in bee populations is a common concern, most press coverage has been directed towards Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD. This is a phenomenon that affects commercially managed honeybees.

However, wild native pollinators, such as bumble bees, are perhaps even more important for the crops.

Alaskan bumble bees, for example, are so well adapted to their environment that they have been observed in temperatures as cold as -3.6°C during snowfall, during the night, and above the tree line. Many of the berries, nuts, and seeds consumed by birds, mammals, and other insects are also a result of bumble bee pollination of native woody and herbaceous plants.

There is a real need to monitor bumble bee populations in North America to assess how their populations are faring and if conservation actions are needed. Alaska, the last frontier, is no exception.

The new survey represents the first multi-year study on bumble bees from the main agricultural areas of Alaska to provide baseline data on species composition, distribution, seasonal biology, and parasites of the bumble bee genus Bombus

Disturbing trends have been identified in populations of the western bumble bee, Bombus occidentalis. Once considered to be one of the most common west coast bumble bee species, it is now declining in the Pacific Northwest. In Alaska, however, it was collected from all three sites and represented roughly 10% of the total specimens, suggesting that B. occidentalis is a relatively abundant species in the areas studied.

Unfortunately, B. occidentalis specimens tested positive for Nosema – a microsporidian parasite linked to recent catastrophic declines throughout North America in the western bumble bee. Social parasites as well as nematodes were also documented in our survey.

“This report provides baseline data needed to help understand reported patterns of bumble bee declines in North America,” explains the lead author Dr. Rehanon Pampell. “Additional research is needed to better understand the biology, geographical distribution, contribution of bumble bees to Alaska agriculture, and the possible effects of endo- and social parasites on bumble bees in the state,” she insisted.

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Additional Information:

Funding for this research was provided by the United States Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Research Service, Subarctic Agricultural Research Unit.

Original source:

Pampell R, Sikes D, Pantoja A, Holloway P, Knight C, Ranft R (2015) Bumble Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Bombus spp.) of Interior Alaska: Species Composition, Distribution, Seasonal Biology, and Parasites. Biodiversity Data Journal 3: e5085. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.3.e5085

A team of researchers from Brazil and Canada has found a South American example of interactions between a group of flies and the mushrooms they feed on as larvae. Though this group of flies has more than 1,100 species known from South and Central America, this is the first report of a species from the family being reared from, and associated with, a host fungus from the South America. The study was published in the open access journal Biodiversity Data Journal.

Even with the large amount of recent research on South American biodiversity, there are still large areas of study that remain unexplored. The natural history and diversity of the mushroom eating fauna (i.e., fungivores) in the region falls into this category.

“Unlike in places like Europe, there has been very little exploration of the fungi inhabiting animals of South America” says Chris Borkent, Postdoctoral researcher at the California State Collection of Arthropods, Sacramento, CA.

Mushrooms and other forms of fungi represent a short-lived shifting habitat that must be quickly found and exploited by the organisms that use them. However, we have very little understanding of how these animals find and use the mushrooms, and what the diversity of this miniature ecosystem is.

One important group of fungal feeder are the fungus gnats, a group of ~4500 species of small flies whose larvae infest mushrooms the world over. These larvae serve in turn as the prey for various other animals, as well as hosts for a suite of parasites and parasitoids.

“We were able to successfully rear a species of fungus gnat from two different mushroom species in Brazil” states Sarah Oliveira, Professor at the Departamento de Ecologia, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia, Brazil.

This also allowed the different life stages to be studied, providing insights into how this species feeds and goes through its metamorphosis.

“Due to these promising first results we are actively collecting other mushrooms and rearing out the larvae within” says Oliveira. “We have already found several records of different species and are planning to continue this effort in order to make linkages between different groups of fungus gnats and mushrooms.”

The dynamics of modern forests are deeply dependent on the life and activity of the fungi and their associated ecosystem.

“In the long run”, mentions Dalton de Souza Amorim, Senior Professor at the Departamento de Biologia, Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil, “understanding the evolution of the relationships between fungus-gnats (and other fungivores) and the fungi themselves helps us understand the evolution of temperate and tropical forests over the last 145 million years..”

The future of mushroom ecosystem study in South America is wide open for exploration!

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Original source:

Oliveira S, Albertoni F, Borkent C, Amorim D (2015) First record of Neoempheria Osten Sacken (Diptera, Mycetophilidae) biology in the Neotropical region, with associations between its larvae and fungi. Biodiversity Data Journal 3: e5073. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.3.e5073