New data on the hoverflies of Morocco (Diptera, Syrphidae) with faunistic and bibliographical inventories
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Sahib S
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7538468 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jan
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:BackgroundHoverflies are among the most important insect pollinators and there is documented evidence of a recent decline in their populations. To trace the past distributions of hoverfly species, verified records of historical collections are essential.New informationHere, we provide data on 1071 specimens of hoverflies collected or received by Jean Timon-David and hosted at the Marseille Natural History Museum, France. Most of the specimens were collected by Timon-David himself and come from south-eastern France, mainly from the Departments of Bouches-du-Rhône, Var and Hautes-Alpes. Most of these specimens were checked for the accuracy of their identification according to the latest identification keys. This resulted in 85 additions to the known fauna of the French Departments, mostly for Var and Bouches-du-Rhône. The taxonomy of all specimens was checked against the latest available checklists and updated names added whenever necessary. Specimens received from entomologists working in other continents may also be valuable, as these are historic testimonies of the fauna of their own respective regions of origin and may, therefore, also be used as reference material. One paratype specimen from Australia is present in the collection. The holotype of Cheilosia vangaveri Timon-David, 1937 is absent from the collection and should be considered as lost. All but two of the specimens with locality labels had their geographical coordinates of origin added in the dataset.
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Project description:Hoverflies (Diptera: Syrphidae) are among the most important pollinators, although they attract less attention than bees. They are usually thought to be rather opportunistic flower visitors, although previous studied demonstrated that they show colour preferences and their nectar feeding is affected by morphological constraints related to flower morphology. Despite the growing appreciation of hoverflies and other non-bee insects as pollinators, there is a lack of community-wide studies of flower visitation by syrphids. The aim of this paper is to provide a detailed analysis of flower visitation patterns in a species rich community of syrphids in a Central European grassland and to evaluate how species traits shape the structure of the plant-hoverfly flower visitation network. We found that different species varied in the level of specialisation, and while some species visited a similar spectre of flowers, others partitioned resources more strongly. There was a consistent difference in both specialisation and flower preferences between three syrphid subfamilies. Eristalinae and Pipizinae were more specialised than Syrphinae. Trait-based analyses showed that relative flower visitation (i) increased with plant height, but most strongly in Eristalinae; (ii) increased with inflorescence size in small species from all three subfamilies, but was independent of inflorescence size in large species of Eristalinae and Syrphinae; and (iii) depended on flower colour, but in a subfamily-specific way. Eristalinae showed the strongest flower colour preferences for white flowers, Pipizinae visited mostly white and yellow flowers, while Syrphinae were less affected by flower colour. Exploration of the structure of the plant-hoverfly flower visitation network showed that the network was both modular and nested. We also found that there were almost no differences in specialisation and relative visitation frequency between males and females. Overall, we showed that flower visitation in syrphids was affected by phylogenetic relatedness, body size of syrphids and several plant traits.
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Project description:The identification of Afrotropical hoverflies is very difficult because of limited recent taxonomic revisions and the lack of comprehensive identification keys. In order to assist in their identification, and to improve the taxonomy of this group, we constructed a reference dataset of 513 COI barcodes of 90 of the more common nominal species from Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria (W Africa) and added ten publically available COI barcodes from nine nominal Afrotropical species to this (total: 523 COI barcodes; 98 nominal species; 26 genera). The identification accuracy of this dataset was evaluated with three methods (K2P distance-based, Neighbor-Joining (NJ) / Maximum Likelihood (ML) analysis, and using SpeciesIdentifier). Results of the three methods were highly congruent and showed a high identification success. Nine species pairs showed a low (< 0.03) mean interspecific K2P distance that resulted in several incorrect identifications. A high (> 0.03) maximum intraspecific K2P distance was observed in eight species and barcodes of these species not always formed single clusters in the NJ / ML analayses which may indicate the occurrence of cryptic species. Optimal K2P thresholds to differentiate intra- from interspecific K2P divergence were highly different among the three subfamilies (Eristalinae: 0.037, Syrphinae: 0.06, Microdontinae: 0.007-0.02), and among the different general suggesting that optimal thresholds are better defined at the genus level. In addition to providing an alternative identification tool, our study indicates that DNA barcoding improves the taxonomy of Afrotropical hoverflies by selecting (groups of) taxa that deserve further taxonomic study, and by attributing the unknown sex to species for which only one of the sexes is known.
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Project description:We explore the phenological response by Danish hoverflies (Syrphidae) to continually rising annual temperatures by analysing >50.000 natural history collection and citizen science records for 37 species collected between 1900 and 2018, a period during which the annual average temperature in Denmark rose significantly (p << 0.01). We perform a simple linear regression analysis of the 10th percentile observation date for each species against year of observation. Fourteen of the species showed a statistically significant (p < 0.05) negative correlation between 10th percentile date and year of observation, indicating earlier emergence as a likely response to climatic warming. Eighteen species showed a non-significant (p ? 0.05) negative correlation between 10th percentile date and year of observation, while four species showed a non-significant (p ? 0.05) positive correlation, and one showed neither a positive nor a negative correlation. We explore the possible impact of the length of the data series on the regression analysis by dividing the species into four groups depending on how far back in time we have data: ultra-short series (with data from 2003-2018); short series (data from 1998-2018); medium series (data from 1980-2018); long series (data from 2018 to before 1980). The length of the series seems to have an effect on the results as 60% of the long series species (nine out of 15) showed a statistically significant negative correlation, while for the shorter series species less than 35% showed a statistically significant negative correlation. When we reduced the long series in length to short series, the proportion of statistically significant negative correlations fell to 33%, confirming this assumption. We conclude that northern temperate hoverflies generally react to the ongoing climatic warming by emerging earlier.
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