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Six new species of Dracula ants from the Malagasy region have been discovered by scientists at the California Academy of Sciences. The discoveries, by postdoctoral fellow Masashi Yoshimura from Japan and curator of entomology Brian L. Fisher, represent a completely new twist in the typically rigid caste system of ants, where anatomy is typically destiny. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

“The genus Mystrium is the most mysterious group within the bizarre Dracula ants.” said Yoshimura.

Mystrium species have unique features such as long, spatulate mandibles that snap together (Gronenberg et al. 1998); wingless queens that in some undetermined species are even smaller than workers (Molet et al. 2007); and large, wingless individuals intermediate between workers and queens, which behave like queens (Molet et al. 2012).

“Mystrium was a difficult group to identify because of the remarkable variation within each species.” Yoshimura said.

“Our team has explored Madagascar and its surrounding islands for 20 years and collected thousands of specimens to solve the mysteries of Mystrium.” said Fisher, an expert on Malagasy ants.

Fisher explained why Mystrium poses such a fiendish problem Mystrium to taxonomists, who identify new and different species. “Mystrium has three different styles in reproduction within a single genus, and the role of an individual in a colony is not always obvious by its appearance. Ants that look similar may be minor workers in one species but queens in another species.” This makes classifying the Dracula ants extremely difficult, he said.

“The discovery of the division of females into major and minor forms were the key to solving this complicated puzzle.” explained Yoshimura. “We found that all species in Mystrium share a common original components consisting of male, usual large queen, and major and minor workers. Furthermore, the major or minor workers develop as reproductives in some species and even take over queen’s position. They are revolutionaries finding in the anatomy-is-destiny world of ants! Taxonomists usually compare the anatomy of ants of the same caste to find differences between species. But in the case of the genus Mystrium, we need to compare individuals from the same original phenotype, not on the their current functional role (caste).” he said.

The authors have reclassified all species into three subgroups based on the reproductive styles, and developed a new taxonomic framework for this complicated group featuring innovative pictorial keys to the species. The illustrations include color photographs showing every hair in focus (produced using a computer-assisted method called auto-montage), and drawings for all castes. The paper looks more like a picture book than your average scientific treatise. “I learned drawing techniques from Japanese manga.” Yoshimura says.

“To name three of the species we chose words that evoke the air of mystery around this genus, calling them Mystrium labyrinth, Mystrium mirror, and Mystrium shadow.” Yoshimura said.

Original source:

Yoshimura M, Fisher BL (2014) A revision of the ant genus Mystrium in the Malagasy region with description of six new species and remarks on Amblyopone and Stigmatomma (Hymenoptera, Formicidae, Amblyoponinae). ZooKeys 394: 1-99. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.394.6446

 

Additional Information:

Gronenberg W, Hölldobler B, Alpert GD (1998) Jaws that snap: control of mandible movements in the ant Mystrium. J Insect Physiol 44: 241-253. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0022-1910(97)00145-5

Molet M, Peeters C, Fisher BL (2007) Winged queens replaced by reproductives smaller than workers in Mystrium ants. Naturwissenschaften 94: 280-287. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00114-006-0190-2

Molet M, Wheeler DE, Peeters C (2012) Evolution of Novel Mosaic Castes in Ants: Modularity, Phenotypic Plasticity, and Colonial Buffering. Am Nat 180: 328-341. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/667368

As a spin-off (pun intended) of their Tropical Biodiversity course in Malaysian Borneo, a team of biology students discover a new spider species, build a makeshift taxonomy lab, write a joint publication and send it off to a major taxonomic journal.

Discovering a new spider species was not what she had anticipated when she signed up for her field course in Tropical Biodiversity, says Elisa Panjang, a Malaysian master’s student from Universiti Malaysia Sabah. She is one of twenty students following the course, organised by Naturalis Biodiversity Center in The Netherlands, and held in the Danau Girang Field Centre in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. The aim of the one-month course, say organisers Vincent Merckx and Menno Schilthuizen, is to teach the students about how the rich tapestry of the tropical lowland rainforest’s ecosystem is woven.

Besides charismatic species, such as the orang-utans that the students encounter every day in the forest, the tropical ecosystem consists of scores of unseen organisms, and the course focus is on these “small things that run the world”—such as the tiny orb-weaving spiders of the tongue-twistingly named family Symphytognathidae. These one-millimetre-long spiders build tiny webs that they suspend between dead leaves on the forest floor. “When we started putting our noses to the ground we saw them everywhere.” says Danish student Jennie Burmester enthusiastically. What they weren’t prepared for was that the webs turned out to be the work of an unknown species, as spider specialist Jeremy Miller, an instructor on the course, quickly confirmed.

The students then decided to make the official naming and description of the species a course project. They rigged the field centre’s microscopes with smartphones to produce images of the tiny spider’s even tinier genitals (using cooking oil from the station’s kitchen to make them more translucent), dusted the spider’s webs with puffs of corn flour (also from the kitchen) to make them stand out and described the way they were built. They also put a spider in alcohol as “holotype”, the obligatory reference specimen for the naming of any new species—which is to be stored in the collection of Universiti Malaysia Sabah. Finally, a dinner-time discussion yielded a name for this latest addition to the tree of life: Crassignatha danaugirangensis, after the field centre’s idyllic setting at the Danau Girang oxbow lake.

All data and images were then compiled into a scientific paper, which, via the station’s satellite link, was submitted to the Biodiversity Data Journal, a leading online journal for quick dissemination of new biodiversity data. Even though thousands of similarly-sized spider species still await discovery, Miller thinks the publication is an important one. “It means we provide a quick anchor point for further work on this species; the naming of a species is the only way to make sure we’re all singing from the same score.” he says.

Peter Schalk, Executive Secretary of Species 2000 / CoL, and GBIF Chair, comments: “This is a fine example of how the taxonomic world is embracing the digital era. Open data and rapid publication form the key for sharing information which in turn provides valuable input for responsible management of the world’s biosphere. One of the most important achievements of this paper is that all data associated with this species have been harvested from the article and collated with other data on GBIF and Encyclopedia of Life right on the day of publication, through a specially designed format called Darwin Core Archive. This is indeed a “real time” data publishing!”

Field station director Benoît Goossens adds: “This tiny new spider is a nice counterpoint to the large-mammal work we’re doing and having it named after the field centre is extremely cool.” The Danau Girang Field Centre is located in the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary, a strip of rainforest along Sabah’s major river, squeezed in by vast oil palm plantations on either side. Despite intensive search, the students could not find the new spider in the plantations.

Original Source:

Miller J, Schilthuizen M, Burmester J, van der Graaf L, Merckx V, Jocqué M, Kessler P, Fayle T, Breeschoten T, Broeren R, Bouman R, Chua W, Feijen F, Fermont T, Groen K, Groen M, Kil N, de Laat H, Moerland M, Moncoquet C, Panjang E, Philip A, Roca-Eriksen R, Rooduijn B, van Santen M, Swakman V, Evans M, Evans L, Love K, Joscelyne S, Tober A, Wilson H, Ambu L, Goossens B (2014) Dispatch from the field: ecology of micro web-building spiders with description of a new species. Biodiversity Data Journal 2: e1076. DOI: 10.3897/BDJ.2.e1076

New species discovery, description and data sharing in less than 30 days

Researchers and the public can now have immediate access to data underlying discovery of new species of life on Earth, under a new streamlined system linking taxonomic research with open data publication.

The partnership paves the way for unlocking and preserving a wealth of ‘small data’ backing up research conclusions, which often become lost within a few years of an article’s publication in an academic journal.

In the first example of the new collaboration in action, the Biodiversity Data Journal carries a peer-reviewed description of a new species of spider discovered during a field course in Borneo just one month ago. At the same time, the data showing location of the spider’s occurrence in nature are automatically harvested by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and richer data such as images and the species description are exported to the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).

This contrasts with an average ‘shelf life’ of twenty-one years between field discovery of a new species and its formal description and naming, according to a recent study in Current Biology.

A group of scientists and students discovered the new species of spider during a field course in Borneo, supervised by Jeremy Miller and Menno Schilthuizen from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, based in Leiden, the Netherlands. The species was described and submitted online from the field to the Biodiversity Data Journal through a satellite internet connection, along with the underlying data . The manuscript was peer-reviewed and published within two weeks of submission. On the day of publication, GBIF and EOL have harvested and included the data in their respective platforms.

The new workflow established between GBIF, EOL and Pensoft Publishers’ Biodiversity Data Journal, with the support of the Swiss NGO Plazi, automatically exports treatment and occurrence data into a Darwin Core Archive, a standard format used by GBIF and other networks to share data from many different sources. This means GBIF can extract these data on the day of the article’s publication, making them immediately available to science and the public through its portal and web services, further enriching the biodiversity data already freely accessible through the GBIF network. Similarly, the information and multimedia resources become accessible via EOL’s species pages.

One of the main purposes of the partnership is to ensure that such data remain accessible for future use in research. A recent study published in Current Biology found that 80 % of scientific data are lost in less than 10 years following their creation.

Donald Hobern, GBIF’s Executive Secretary, commented: “A great volume of extremely important information about the world’s species is effectively inaccessible, scattered across thousands of small datasets carefully curated by taxonomic researchers. I find it very exciting that this new workflow will help preserve these ‘small data’ and make them immediately available for re-use through our networks.”

“Re-use of data published on paper or in PDF format is a huge challenge in all branches of science”, said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, managing director of Pensoft and founder of the Biodiversity Data Journal. “This problem has been tackled firstly by our partners from Plazi who created a workflow to extract data from legacy literature and submit it to GBIF. The workflow currently launched by GBIF, EOL and the Biodiversity Data Journal radically shortens the way from publication of data to their sharing and re-use and makes the whole process cost efficient.”, added Prof. Penev.

The elaboration of the workflow from BDJ and Plazi to GBIF through Darwin Core Archive was supported by the EU-funded project EU BON (Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network, grant No 308454). The basic concept has been initially discussed and outlined in the course of the pro-iBiosphere project (Coordination and policy development in preparation for a European Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System, addressing Acquisition, Curation, Synthesis, Interoperability and Dissemination, grant No 312848).

Miller J, Schilthuizen M, Burmester J, van der Graaf L, Merckx V, Jocqué M, Kessler P, Fayle T, Breeschoten T, Broeren R, Bouman R, Chua W, Feijen F, Fermont T, Groen K, Groen M, Kil N, de Laat H, Moerland M, Moncoquet C, Panjang E, Philip A, Roca-Eriksen R, Rooduijn B, van Santen M, Swakman V, Evans M, Evans L, Love K, Joscelyne S, Tober A, Wilson H, Ambu L, Goossens B (2014) Dispatch from the field: ecology of micro web-building spiders with description of a new species. Biodiversity Data Journal 2: e1076. DOI: 10.3897/BDJ.2.e1076

 

Additional information:

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international open data infrastructure, funded by governments. It allows anyone, anywhere to access data about all types of life on Earth, shared across national boundaries via the Internet. By encouraging and helping institutions to publish data according to common standards, GBIF enables research not possible before, and informs better decisions to conserve and sustainably use the biological resources of the planet.

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) operates as an ongoing collaboration among its international partners with the mission to raise awareness and understanding of living nature. With additional support from a global network of content partners, curators and users, EOL works to provide free, open, multilingual, digital access to trusted information on all known species.

Pensoft Publishers specialize in academic and professional book and journal publishing, mostly in the field of biodiversity science and natural history. On 16th of September 2013, Pensoft launched the Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) and the associated Pensoft Writing Tool (PWT), as the first workflow ever to put together article authoring, community peer-review, publishing and dissemination within a single online collaborative platform.

Plazi GmbH is a service SME owned by the Swiss based not for profit Plazi Verein, supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital taxonomic literature. Plazi GmbH has been founded to provide services, training and consulting in the domain of digitization, open access publishing and access to taxonomy related published content.

 

Contacts:

Tim Hirsch
Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)
Email: thirsch@gbif.org
Tel.: +45 28751485

Jeremy Miller
Naturalis Biodiversity Center
Email: jeremy.miller@naturalis.nl

Lyubomir Penev
Pensoft Publishers
Email: penev@pensoft.net

A Malaysian-Dutch team of biologists have catalogued all 31 species of the tiny, but oh so pretty snail genus Plectostoma from West-Malaysia, Sumatra, and Thailand. Ten species are new to science, but some of those are going extinct as they are being discovered.

The study was carried out by PhD student Thor-Seng Liew of Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, The Netherlands, and three colleagues. Liew, who is on study leave from Universiti Malaysia Sabah, spent four years studying the distribution, shell shape, and genetics of these minuscule snails. He is still working on the species from Borneo, where Plectostoma is exceptionally diverse, but in the new paper, published in the open access journal ZooKeys, he first gets the species from the rest of Asia out of the way.

The snails are special for several reasons, says Liew. ‘First of all, they flaunt all shell-coiling rules, by having very irregularly coiled and ornamented shells, making them look like microjewelry.’ Liew used a so-called micro-CT-scanner, which produces three-dimensional X-rays of very tiny objects, to investigate the exact shapes of the shells. This allowed him to recognise 31 species, ten of which were new to science.

Another peculiarity is that they only live on limestone hills. In Southeast Asia, such hills are usually few and far between, and the snails that manage to colonise them are completely isolated. This, in turn, has caused a lot of “endemism”: many Plectostoma species only occur on a single hill and nowhere else on earth.

But their endemism may also be their downfall, as Liew found out. Limestone hills are ‘sitting ducks’ for mining companies, and many are being quarried away for cement, taking their unique snails with them to their grave. One species, Plectostoma sciaphilum, is already extinct: its home was turned into concrete around 2003. Similar fates await at least six more species. One of these, P. tenggekensis (named and described in the new paper) occurs only on Bukit Tenggek, which the authors forecast to be completely gone by the end of 2014.

To highlight the plight of these unsung victims, the authors named several of the new species after conservationists and politicians who have fought for the preservation of Malaysia’s endangered limestone hills.

Original source:

Liew T-S, Vermeulen JJ, bin Marzuki ME, Schilthuizen M (2014) A cybertaxonomic revision of the micro-landsnail genus Plectostoma Adam (Mollusca, Caenogastropoda, Diplommatinidae), from Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra and Indochina. ZooKeys 393: 1. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.393.6717

A scientist has discovered 19 new species of praying mantis from Central and South America. The new species of bark mantises were discovered in tropical forests and also found among existing museum collections. Dr. Gavin Svenson, curator of invertebrate zoology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, described the new species and published a revision of the genus Liturgusa in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Svenson collected the insects from eight countries in Central and South America, as well as gathered hundreds of specimens from 25 international museums in North America, South America and Europe. Many of the newly described species are known only from a few specimens collected before 1950 from locations that are now heavily impacted by agriculture or development.

“This group, the Neotropical bark mantises, are incredibly fast runners that live on the trunks and branches of trees.” said Svenson of The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. “This violates the common perception of praying mantises being slow and methodical hunters.”

Like most praying mantises, they are highly camouflage. However, this group is flattened in appearance and is very difficult to locate because of their adept mimicry of bark, moss and lichen. They often evade discovery by running to the opposite side of the tree before being noticed, an escape tactic also seen in many tree dwelling lizards.

“This is an amazing behavior for an insect because it shows that they are not only relying on camouflage like most insects but are constantly monitoring their environment and taking action to run and hide.” said Svenson. “In addition, some species leap off the tree trunk to avoid capture and play dead after fluttering down to the forest floor since none of the species are strong fliers.”

As highly visual predators, the bark mantis species appear to be active hunters that pursue prey as opposed to ambush hunters that wait for prey to come close. Also, like a similar bark mantis group from Australia (Ciulfina), this Neotropical group does not appear to exhibit cannibalism, which is an often misunderstood characteristic exhibited by some praying mantis species.

The research brings to light a previously unknown diversity of bark mantises. It indicates that there are many more species to discover.

“Based on this study, we can predict that mantis groups with similar habitat specialization in Africa, Asia and Australia will also be far more diverse than what is currently known,” said Svenson. “Many of these groups have never been studied other than by the scientists that originally described some of the species, which in some cases is more than 100 years ago. This is exciting because enormous potential exists for advancing our understanding of praying mantis diversity just by looking within our existing museum collections and conducting a few field expeditions.”

The discovery of these 19 new species triples the diversity of the group that scientists thought had only a few species with broad geographical ranges. The research indicates that most species are far more restricted in their locations within regions of Central and South America. This increased diversity and better measure of distribution has broad implications for conservation since many of the species were found in or near natural areas that may or may not be protected. The conservation status of some of the new mantises found in museum collections is not known since they have not been seen since originally collected in the early 1900s and could be highly threatened or even extinct.

Among the new species, Liturgusa algorei, is named for Albert Arnold “Al” Gore Jr., former vice president of the United States of America, to honor his environmental activism and efforts to raise public awareness of global climate change. Liturgusa krattorum is named for Martin and Chris Kratt, hosts and creators of Kratts’ Creatures and Wild Kratts, both of which provide children with entertaining and accurate programming on animal biology. Liturgusa fossetti is named in honor of the late James Stephen Fossett for his inspirational dedication to exploration. Liturgusa bororum is named for the Bora people, a group of people native to parts of the Amazon basin in northern Peru, Columbia and Brazil. Liturgusa tessae is named for Svenson’s daughter, Tessa. Liturgusa zoae is named for Svenson’s daughter, Zoey.

Svenson’s research is focused on the evolutionary patterns of relationship, distribution and complex features of praying mantises. His current research project aims to align new sources of relationship evidence (DNA sequence data) with morphology and other features to create a new and accurate classification system for praying mantises that reflects true evolutionary relationships.

This project was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants to Gavin J. Svenson, Jason Cryan and Michael Whiting. The project was also supported by the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies of Brigham Young University, the New York State Museum and the Museum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris.

 

About The Cleveland Museum of Natural History:

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, incorporated in 1920, is one of the finest institutions of its kind in North America. It is noted for its collections, research, educational programs and exhibits. The collections encompass more than 5 million artifacts and specimens, and research of global significance focuses on 10 natural science disciplines. The Museum conserves biological diversity through the protection of more than 5,800 acres of natural areas. It promotes health education with local programs and distance learning that extends across the globe. Its GreenCityBlueLake Institute is a center of thought and practice for the design of green and sustainable cities. http://www.cmnh.org

 

Original Source:

Svenson GJ (2014) Revision of the Neotropical bark mantis genus Liturgusa Saussure, 1869 (Insecta, Mantodea, Liturgusini). ZooKeys 390: 1–214. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.390.6661

Armored spiders are medium to small species that derive their name from the complex pattern of the plates covering their abdomen strongly resembling body armor. Lurking in the darkness of caves In Southeast China, scientists discover and describe five new species of these exciting group of spiders. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

The common name armored spiders is given to the engaging family Tetrablemmidae. Distinguished by their peculiar armor-like abdominal pattern, these tropical and subtropical spiders are mainly collected from litter and soil, but like the newly described species some live in caves. Some cave species, but also some soil inhabitants, show typical adaptations of cave spiders, such as loss of eyes. The genus Tetrablemma, for example, to which two of the new species belong, is distinguished by having only 4 eyes.

All these new spiders are collected from the South China Karst, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The South China Karst spans the provinces of Guangxi, Guizhou, and Yunnan. It is noted for its karst features and landscapes as well as rich biodiversity. UNESCO describes the South China Karst as “unrivalled in terms of the diversity of its karst features and landscapes.”

Colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences under the leadership of Professor Shuqiang LI have investigated more than 2000 caves in the South China Karst. Several hundred new species of cave spiders are reported by Shuqiang Li and colleagues. As a result, the total known spider species of China increased from 2300 species to 4300 species in the last 10 years.

Original Source:

Lin Y, Li S (2014) New cave-dwelling armored spiders (Araneae, Tetrablemmidae) from Southwest China. ZooKeys 388: 35. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.388.5735

Who said that there is only sand in the deserts? Not quite desert roses, two new species of desert poppies from North America prove such statements wrong with their simple beauty. The newly described plants are found in the deserts of California and Arizona and have a vibrant yellow colored inflorescences, typical for all the desert dwellers from the Eschscholzia genus of the poppy family. The study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys.

Most commonly known for the iconic California Poppy, the state flower of California, Eschscholzia is a genus in the poppy family Papaveraceae that previously held 12 species. The genus is native to the mainland and islands of western North America in both the United States and Mexico, but the type species, Eschscholzia californica, is commonly spread and has invaded Mediterranean regions around the world.

Shannon Still discovered the new species while studying Eschscholzia for his dissertation research at the University of California Davis. “What is interesting about these new species is that, while people have been collecting these plants for decades, they were not recognized as something different.” Still said. “They were always confused for existing species. This confusion led to my study of the group, and ultimately, recognizing something new. I imagine there are many more desert plant species that are also understudied.”

The two new desert species E. androuxii and E. papastillii are found in desert washes, flats, and slopes growing in coarse and sandy soil across California deserts and parts of Arizona. Eschscholzia androuxii has a small range, is fairly uncommon and is suggested that it be listed as a rare plant species. The wide distribution of the other species, suggests there are no conservation threats at the moment.

Still acknowledges the resources that lay the foundation for his research. “My work would have been impossible without a strong system of specimen and data sharing from herbaria around the world, and especially in California. I used the herbarium specimens to compare with collections I had made from the field, to establish important characters used to identify the species, and to examine the species’ geographic ranges. This work highlights the value that herbarium collections play in cataloging, understanding and conserving our biological diversity.”

Original Source:

Still SM (2014) Two new desert Eschscholzia (Papaveraceae) from southwestern North America. PhytoKeys 35: 45. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.3

A genus of cockroach in the poorly studied family Corydiidae has been revised for the first time since 1920. The revision has resulted in the discovery and description of 39 new species of Arenivaga, a genus which previously held nine species. The Corydiidae family of roaches is found worldwide and its constituents are frequently found in harsh, dry habitats not usually associated with cockroaches. They are also often subterranean in their habits making their presence easily overlooked.

The study was completed over a four-year period by Heidi Hopkins, who is a cockroach taxonomic specialist and PhD candidate at the University of New Mexico, Museum of Southwestern Biology, in Albuquerque, NM. Her results have been published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

“The extent of the radiation of this genus is quite surprising’.”, said Hopkins. “These animals have remarkable adaptations that allow them to succeed in some of the harshest places on earth. I suspect that the thorough application of modern collection methods would reveal many more species of Arenivaga across Mexico, and many more species of Corydiidae in the deserts and dry places of the rest of the world.”

Arenivaga, also known as desert or sand cockroaches, are dramatically sexually dimorphic, meaning that the females look nothing like the males. This makes the association of female specimens of a species with male specimens of the same species very difficult. Hopkins’ work is based on male specimens only, and species are separated from one another by characters of the genitalia, which are incredibly complex.

“The order Blattodea (cockroaches) which includes termites, comprise some of the earth’s greatest decomposers. They are the planet’s recyclers and clearly they have a role to play even in terrain with very little plant matter requiring decomposition. We can no longer think of cockroaches as creatures restricted to the moisture of the tropics.”, explained Hopkins.

Hopkins has great admiration and passion for cockroaches. She will continue her work by beginning a revision of the poorly understood family Corydiidae during her post doc at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ.

Original source:

Hopkins H (2014) A revision of the genus Arenivaga (Rehn) (Blattodea, Corydiidae), with descriptions of new species and key to the males of the genus. ZooKeys 384: 1–256. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.384.6197

An inventory of wild-caught caterpillars, its food plants and parasitoids, has been going on for more than 34 years in Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), a protected area of approximately 1200 km2 in northwestern Costa Rica. As a result, more than 10,000 species of moths and butterflies are estimated to live in ACG. Their caterpillars are in turn attacked by many parasitoid wasps, also numbering thousands of species. However, most of those wasps have never been described and remain unknown.

For the past few years researchers from Canada, Costa Rica and the United States have been studying intensively one of these groups of parasitoids: the Microgastrinae wasps – named that way because most of the species have a short abdomen. These small wasps (1-5 mm long) are one of the most common and diverse groups of parasitoids recovered from caterpillars anywhere.

The authors of this study, published in the open access journal ZooKeys, analysed more than 4,000 specimens of just one single genus of microgastrine parasitoid wasps from ACG: Apanteles, previously known from only three species in Costa Rica. The results are astonishing: 186 new species were found just in ACG. That is more diversity than all the species of Apanteles previously described from the New World. It also represents 20% the world fauna, in less than 0.001 % of the terrestrial area of the Planet!

“What this study shows is how much we have underestimated the actual diversity of parasitoid wasps, and how much we still have to learn about them.” said Dr. José Fernández-Triana, one of the authors of the paper. “When other areas of the planet are as well collected and studied as ACG has been, the number of new species of parasitoid wasps to be discovered will be mind-boggling.”

The study also found than most of the wasps species (90%) only parasitized one or just a few species of moths or butterflies, suggesting that the Microgastrinae parasitoid wasps are more specialized than previously suspected.

All the new species of ACG are described through an innovative approach that integrates morphological, molecular and biological data, computer-generated descriptions, and high-quality illustrations for every single species. The combination of techniques allowed the researchers to speed up the process of describing new species, without reducing the quality of the paper. Images of the cocoons that the wasps spin when emerging from the parasitized caterpillar were also included whenever possible, to encourage more studies on caterpillars and their parasitoids.

“We hope that this paper lays a foundation for similar studies on other tropical areas of the world.”, said Fernández-Triana. “In fact, most of the new species were named after the local persons (parataxonomists) in Costa Rica who actually collected the caterpillars in the field and reared the wasps used in this study. It is an excellent way to acknowledge and honor their valuable contribution, and we expect that in the future more citizens feel engaged to contribute to Science in similar ways.”

Original Source:

Fernández-Triana JL, Whitfield JB, Rodriguez JJ, Smith MA, Janzen DH, Hallwachs W, Hajibabaei M, Burns JM, Solis MA, Brown J, Cardinal S, Goulet H, Hebert PDN (2014) Title. Review of Apanteles sensu stricto (Hymenoptera, Braconidae, Microgastrinae) from Area de Conservación Guanacaste, northwestern Costa Rica, with keys to all described species from Mesoamerica. ZooKeys 383: 1–565. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.383.6418

Butterflies are probably best-loved insects. As such, they are relatively well studied, especially in the United States. Eastern parts of the country are explored most thoroughly. First eastern US butterfly species were described by the father of modern taxonomy Carl Linnaeus himself, over 250 years ago. For the last two and a half centuries, naturalists have been cataloguing species diversity of eastern butterflies, and every nook and cranny has been searched. Some even say that we learned everything there is to know about taxonomy of these butterflies.

Discovery of a new eastern USA butterfly species is indeed very rare nowadays. It is even more remarkable that Texas researchers discovered not just one, but two new species at once. “It was completely unexpected.”, said Dr. Grishin. ”We were studying genetics of these butterflies and noticed something very odd. Butterflies looked indistinguishable, were flying together at the same place on the same day, but their DNA molecules were very different from each other. We thought there was some kind of mistake in our experiments.”

But there was no mistake. Segments of DNA sequences obtained from these butterflies, clustered in two groups. While wing patterns in the two groups were indeed very similar, inspection of genitalia revealed profound differences. Males and females from one cluster had larger and paler genitalia, and males and females from the other cluster possessed smaller and darker genitalia, among other numerous distinctions. It became clear that the researchers were dealing with two species, which were not even very closely related to each other, just very similar in wing patterns. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

One of these species is a well-known Carolina Satyr (Hermeuptychia sosybius), discovered two centuries ago, in 1793: a small brown butterfly, just over an inch in wingspan, with eyespots along the edge of wings. It is one of the most common eastern US butterflies and a usual denizen of shaded, wooded areas, hence the name. The other species was new. It was named “Intricate Satyr” (Hermeuptychia intricata) for ”the difficulty in recognizing this very distinct species and its intricate ventral wing patterns”, Cong & Grishin write. Initially discovered in Brazos Bend State Park in East Texas, Intricate Satyr is widely distributed all over eastern USA in several states, including Florida and South Carolina.

One discovery leads to another. Being curious about genetic makeup of these Satyrs, Cong & Grishin decided to investigate DNA sequences and genitalia of Satyr populations from South Texas. And it immediately paid off. These populations turned out to be another new species, named “South Texas Satyr” (Hermeuptychia hermybius). Interestingly, South Texas Satyr is a close relative of Carolina Satyr, but Intricate Satyr is rather distant from either of them.

This begs a question about how many more new species of eastern butterflies remain to be discovered and currently hide behind their colourful wings? Nobody really knows, but it is clear that nothing can be further from truth than a statement that there is not much new to be learned about North American butterflies.

Original source:

Cong Q, Grishin N (2014) A new Hermeuptychia (Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae, Satyrinae) is sympatric and synchronic with H. sosybius in southeast US coastal plains, while another new Hermeuptychia species – not hermes – inhabits south Texas and northeast Mexico. ZooKeys 379 : 43, doi: 10.3897/zookeys.379.6394