New genus of Microgastrinae published today

The journal Zootaxa publishes today an important paper on the microgastrine wasps of the African Reunion Island, in the vicinity of Madagascar. It covers 34 species, 18 of them described as new; as well as the description of a new genus: Dodogaster Rousse, 2013. [The link provided just gives access to the title, abstract and key words, anyone interested in a full copy should contact the authors, because the paper is not open access].

This is the first comprehensive paper dealing with Afrotropical species in almost 50 years, and we can only hope it will be followed by similar works in the near future. As far as I know, there are two other projects underway related to Africa (Arabian Peninsula and Madagascar) which should have papers ready for submitting relatively soon. I plan to cover those efforts in future posts. Nevertheless, much remains to be done yet.

The authors of the paper on the Reunion Island fauna are Pascal Rousse (currently a post-doctoral associate with Simon van Noort in the Iziko Museums, Cape Town, South Africa) and Ankita Gupta (a scientist with the National Bureau of Agriculturally Important Insects, Division of Insect Systematics, in Bangalore, India). Both are talented researchers working with Microgastrinae -among other groups- for the past few years. 

 

Dodogaster, the new genus, is a distinctive one, and it remains to be seen if it is also found elsewhere outside Reunion. We just need to keep working on this amazing group of wasps because there are so many species still awaiting for discovery... Sincere congratulations to the authors!

Internet resources about Microgastrinae. Part III

This is the third part of a series of posts discussing available, free, Internet resources on microgastrine wasps (Braconidae). The interested reader can retrieve the complete series by searching for the Tag "Internet Resources" within this blog.

Today I will be discussing the Digital Collection of the Taiwan Agriculture Research Institute (TARI), a project that claims it is aimed to avoid the unnecessary damage to its insect collection by providing access to images of its specimens. The website has a clear Copyright Statement -which can be read here. It is quite fair, and allows the visitor to use the information as long as the source is acknowledged.

I first found this site when doing some searches for Microgastrinae photos. And I was impressed by the quality and scope of the pictures. Last time I checked, it contained images of 514 species of Braconidae, including 77 microgastrines. [Of course, the project also shows photos of other insect orders, but I only checked for the  braconid wasps featured there]. 

Most of the specimens have been photographed several times (lateral and dorsal views, head frontal, details of the meso and/or metasoma, labels of the specimen, etc). Sometimes a couple of specimens per species are shown, and although it might be argued that there is duplication of images, it is however good to see more than one specimen.

A braconid wasp and global warming

In previous posts I have "profiled" several species of braconid wasps which were interesting or significant for some reason (large species, important parasitoids of major pests, potential interest in conservation biology, taxonomic complexes, etc). Today I will introduce a species that might be shrinking its distribution due to warmer temperatures.

The microgastrine wasp Microgaster deductor Nixon (1968) is a very distinctive braconid, and can be easily separated from all Holarctic species of Microgaster based on its tarsal claws, which have a lobe. 

Microgaster deductor, color photo of a female specimen from Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, deposited in the Canadian National Collection of insects. The drawings are taken from the original description (Nixon, 1968) to show details of  the tarsal lobe (red arrow) and head in frontal view.
 
Until very recently the species was thought to be restricted to northern areas of Europe, in the Western Palearctic. But in 2008 I found in the Canadian National Collection many specimens collected in 1940-1950 from Chuchill, Manitoba, Canada. That locality was the first record of the species for North America. In 2010 the species was collected again in another Canadian locality: Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories. Thus, and based on the information currently known, M. deductor seems to be distributed in sub-Arctic or Arctic areas of Europe and North America.

Distribution of Microgaster deductor (blue dots) based on literature records (Europe) and CNC specimens (Canada). There is a record from Poland that is not included here pending verification of its accuracy.

Internet resources about Microgastrinae. Part II

This is the second part of a series of posts discussing available, free, Internet resources on microgastrine wasps (Braconidae). The interested reader can retrieve the complete series by searching for the Tag "Internet Resources" within this blog.

One of the most important sites for any person working with braconids (and indeed also with Ichneumonidae wasps, but that is beyond this blog) is Taxapad: http://www.taxapad.com/. I would argue that perhaps this is THE main resource freely available when checking for names of species, its hosts, the plants related to those species (either as food for the host, or just as a food source for the wasp itself), and associated references. The starting point for all those searches is the page named Global Index, I guarantee to anyone who browses it to be amazed by the amount of information provided there. 

As extraordinary as the online, free version of Taxapad is, there is yet a much more complete electronic version, currently sold as a flash drive (Dicky Sick Ki Yu, Cornelis van Achterberg & Klaus Horstmann. 2012. Taxapad 2012, Ichneumonoidea 2011. Database on flash-drive. www.taxapad.com, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada). That Taxapad version has many more options and resources. For example, it allows the user to generate a list of species for a particular region or country, search available references for a particular taxon, look at host families for a group of species, or the institution hosting a holotype, synonym history, and many more things. It is worth every cent of its price, and any institution/researcher that can afford it, should seriously consider buying it. [Disclaimer: I have no relationship whatsoever with the making and/or commercializing of Taxapad].

The genius behind Taxapad is Dicky Yu, an unsung hymenopterist hero. Through his hard work gathering references, and his mastery of databasing, we are all lucky to have the powerful tool that Taxapad is. Of course, we are also lucky to have Kees van Achterberg (a braconid specialist) and Klaus Horstmann (an ichneumonid specialist) that provide the expert review of the contents. [And for the Taxapad module of Chalcidoidea wasps, we are also lucky to have John Noyes doing that part].

The taxonomic conundrum of Cotesia xylina and Cotesia yakutatensis

One of the main purposes of this blog is to provide comments on species of Microgastrinae that are of interest to a broader audience. I am still thinking on how to organize those posts to make them more useful to potential users, and hopefully soon will come with a system to do that. In the meantime, I am tagging them with the label "Species Profile", to make it easier to search and retrieve that kind of data.

Today I will briefly comment on two Nearctic species of Cotesia that present an interesting challenge to taxonomists and biocontrol workers alike: Cotesia xylina (Say, 1836) and C. yakutatensis (Ashmead, 1902).  Both species are only found in the Nearctic region, although yakutatensis has a wider and more northern range, extending up to Alaska in the West and up to Greenland in the East.

Distribution of Cotesia xylina and Cotesia yakutatensis. Data taken from Taxapad (2012). The coloured areas represent the Provinces/States where the species have been recorded, but no information on exact localities is shown here.

Both species have been reared from several species of Lepidoptera, mostly from the family Noctuidae, with some of the hosts representing agricultural pests. The validity of some records is questionable, especially the ones from Pyralidae and Sphingidae -those were reported in papers before 1920 (mostly late XIX century), and the wasps species may just have been missidentified.


C. xylina has been recorded parasitizing eight species of caterpillars: Epiglaea apiata, Mamestra configurata, Peridroma saucia, Xestia c-nigrum, Xylena nupera (all noctuids), Evergestis rimosalis (Pyralidae), Lampara bombycoides, and Smerinthus jamaicensis (Sphingidae). As written above, the last two records are suspicious.

As far as I know, there is no published paper providing illustrations or drawings of C. xylina, so here I present one colour photo taken a couple of years ago in the CNC.  

Internet resources about Microgastrinae. Part I

When I started thinking about this blog (and how to do it, what to put here, etc), of course that I asked for advice. Several colleagues were encouraging. Others did not care much. One told me: "Why should you worry to write a blog that might be read by 4-5 people...?" 

As hard at is sounds, it might well be the truth: after 2 months and a dozen of posts, I had only received two comments (plus a few courteous email messages). It certainly did not look as if the masses out there were crazy to know more about braconids. If only a braconid wasp would be brave enough to marry a TV "celebrity"... you can only dream.

Seriously though, the main motivation to write this blog came from the realization of how few (and sometimes outdated) information about Braconidae is out there. With this post I am starting a series examining the available Internet resources on Microgastrinae. I am focusing on that subfamily because it is the group I work with, but the situation is pretty much the same for any braconid subfamily -and indeed for most of the parasitoid wasps overall... As part of my "review" of those sites, I will add my opinions on them. [Of course, you should take my comments with a grain of salt, feel free to judge those websites by yourself, and not necessarily agree with what I think!].  

At the beginning of my work with microgastrine wasps, in 2006, my initial stop would invariably be the site of Dr. James Whitfield, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There were three main reasons for that: 

1) You can find there lots of Jim's papers (plus some of his former students and/or colleagues) as free pdf files for downloading. My initial library on the group was made primarily from those resources, including some very useful keys. I particularly recommend his key to the New World genera of Microgastrinae, but also very handy are the keys on Pholetesor (2006) and Parapanteles (2009). Any person interested should browse with detail the resources there under "Publications".

Supporting the Encyclopedia of Life

For the past ten days I have not been able to add more posts to the blog. I do not have any particular "quota" of posts-per-time to fulfill; this blog is a volunteer effort that I do from home in the evenings, and the frequency varies according to my available time. However, ideally I would like to have 4-5 posts/month (about one post/week).

One of the reasons I am a bit delayed is because of spending some time changing the formatting of the blog. [Thanks to my 12 years-old daughter, she convinced me that my sense of style is pathetic, and so I was kind of forced "to improve" the presentation of the blog according to her much better aesthetic opinions].

But the main reason is that I have been exploring ways to contribute contents to the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). This was always part of my intentions when starting the blog. Many more people go to EOL to look for information about living things than they would ever come to this blog -and rightly so! Thus, it made complete sense for me to (try to) make available information about braconid wasps to as many users as possible. On top of that, EOL has few contents about Braconidae -and especially very few pages about microgastrine wasps. Even the name applied to the subfamily (Microgasterinae) is not the named currently used and accepted (Microgastrinae). See below a copy of that EOL page: