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:

A braconid wasp in the COSEWIC List?

The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) exists to provide Canadians and their governments with advice regarding the status of wildlife species that are nationally at risk of extinction or extirpation. Its committee of experts assesses and designates which wildlife species are in some danger of disappearing from the national territory. As part of  its work, COSEWIC produces a Candidate List of species. I strongly recommend to anyone interested in the protection of the Canadian nature to visit the COSEWIC website, and to support their work and that of similar organizations. [Disclaimer: I do not work for COSEWIC, nor I am involved with their efforts in any capacity].

My interest in COSEWIC, and the reason I am writing this post today is to discuss the POSSIBILITY of including a parasitoid Braconidae wasp within their list. Is that a real thing? Or am I just getting too excited with my subject of research?

Let's look at the facts and try to be impartial. COSEWIC List includes quite a few arthropods species. Which in itself is something truly amazing, especially in this world that usually focus its conservation efforts in large, charismatic fauna -conservation efforts also prioritize the flora, but I will leave plants out of this comment and will restrict myself to animals for the time being. 

Small animals, like insects, tend to be almost completely overlooked... unless they are "charismatic" by themselves, e.g. a beautiful butterfly, a conspicuous bumble bee, a colorful ground beetle, a large dragon fly, etc. But a small parasitoid wasp (2.5 mm long)... are you kidding me? Who cares about THAT?

Well, as they say "no harm in trying", and I am trying today to present the case for a first parasitoid wasp to be considered by COSEWIC: the microgastrine species Apanteles samarshalli Fernández-Triana, 2010.

The species was described very recently, in 2010, from specimens found mostly in southern Florida, United States (Everglades and the Florida Keys). I have also found additional specimens in two countries of Central America (data from unpublished studies). 

But, the original description also recorded the species from one Canadian locality: Rondeau Provincial Park, in southwestern Ontario. Rondeau truly honours its reputation of having species commonly found at much southern latitudes, because the single specimen collected there (in August of 1973, and deposited in the Canadian National Collection of Insects, Ottawa) happens to be, by far, the northernmost known for the species.

Open for business: Apanteles fumiferanae

The microgastrine wasp Apanteles fumiferanae Viereck is one the most important Braconidae -as forest pest management concerns- in North America. Based on specimens available in collections, it is the most common braconid parasitoid reared from the spruce budworm Choristoneura fumiferanae (Harris) (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae), which in turn is one of the major forest pests in the region.

Very few pests rival the spruce budworm in importance, and thus this lepidopteran species has been extensively studied over the years. There are hundreds of papers covering details of its biology, ecology, damage and control (biological, chemical, integrated). As part of those studies, for many years its caterpillars have been collected and reared for parasitoids, providing perhaps the best information ever available for a single forest pest in the Neartic. And still there are many details to be researched and understood!

Some recent papers summarize what we know until now. For example, an excellent analysis of the complex relationships between the spruce budworm and its parasitoids/hyperparasitoids/pathogens, was published by Eldon Eveleigh (Canadian Forest Service, CFS) and ten co-authors in 2007; it can be freely downloaded here. Reading that paper will open anyone eyes regarding the complexities of the food webs in a temperate forest. I especially recommend to check Figure 1 of that paper (which is not for the faint of heart!). One can only image similar analysis for a tropical forest... it is just mind boggling.

From a parasitoid perspective, John Huber, also from the CFS, led a team of four taxonomists to produce a series of papers covering all major groups of parasitoids of the genus Choristoneura in the Nearctic region: chalcid wasps (Huber, 1996), tachinid flies (O'Hara, 2005), ichneumonid wasps (Bennett, 2008) and braconid wasps (Fernández-Triana and Huber, 2010). Those works provided numerous illustrations, keys, and taxonomic notes to help identifying the large fauna of currently known parasitoids (230 species within 106 genera and 13 different families; see figures 155-157 and Discussion in Fernández-Triana and Huber (2010). [Unfortunately those papers can be downloaded for free, except for their Abstracts. However, being one of the authors of the braconid paper, I have plenty of reprints for that one, and would be pleased to send copies to anyone interested].

Which bring us back to the topic of this post: Apanteles fumiferanae. The species is widely distributed in the Nearctic region (there is also a record from Poland, but that might be incorrect). It has been reared from caterpillars of 17 lepidopteran species representing 4 families (although some of those early records, from historical references, are likely to be wrong). Close to one hundred scientific papers have dealt with that wasp species, and there is reason to believe more are needed... Why? Because A. fumiferanae actually comprises a complex of morphologically cryptic species (i.e. species that cannot be easily separate based on external morphology, yet are distinct biological entities).

Numbers matter

This week I was talking to my colleague Caroline Boudreault about the numbers of Braconidae specimens, species, and primary types that we currently have in Ottawa (Canadian National Collection of Insects, CNC). Caroline, an extremely skillful and knowledgeable person when it comes to braconids, had been asked to revise and update the number of primary types here.  

Primary types (i.e. holotypes, syntypes, lectotypes, and neotypes, as defined by Articles 73-75 of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature) are usually one of the main factors considered when evaluating the weight of a collection. The more the types, the higher a collection is ranked. Because primary types are name-bearing specimens. 

So, how good is the CNC in terms of Braconidae types? According to Taxapad, there are almost 300 institutions worldwide storing primary type material of braconid wasps, altogether representing 20,007 type specimens. And, according to that source, Ottawa is the 5th largest collection in the world, with 683 types (see pie chart below).

Number of primary types (mostly holotypes) stored in 272 collections of Braconidae worldwide (after Taxapad, 2012).

When Caroline added some new data that is not yet in Taxapad, the number rose to more than 720. And then we will be incorporating over 200 new holotypes within the next couple of months (I will write about that development in a future post). Thus, in round numbers, the CNC collection of Braconidae is approaching the one-thousand-types mark. 

Of course, beyond the number of primary types it is also important to know the number of specimens overall, the geographic coverage of the collection per se, and its curation state. We do not know those figures with the same precision as for the types, but below I share what have found out so far.

There are almost 60 cabinets, each with 29 drawers, for a total of over 1,600 drawers with braconid wasps in the CNC (a previous summary mentioned 1,500 drawers of Braconidae, but that number has increased steadily in the past two years). Based on that, and on a conservative average number of specimens/drawer,  my tentative estimate would be around half million of specimens. And that only represents the mounted/pined material; there is a huge collection in alcohol (several thousand vials, as mentioned here), where many more thousands specimens await to be processed and incorporated to the main (dry) collection.