Chromosomes of Belonocnematreatae Mayr, 1881 (Hymenoptera, Cynipidae).
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Gokhman VE
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4488968 | biostudies-other | 2015
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
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Project description:BackgroundSpecies of Prionomastix Mayr were not known from India when Manickavasagam and Rameshkumar 2011 and Rameshkumar and Poorani 2015 misidentified a new species as P. siccarius. Now it is corrected by explaining the characters as to why it is new and not P. siccarius along with another new species. As we have one another new species, P. orientialis, described by Rameshkumar and Poorani 2015 our two new species are compared with P. orientalis also.New informationTwo new species of Prionomastix Mayr (Hymenoptera: Encyrtidae), one from Bihar state and the other from Tamil Nadu state, India, are described viz., P. tamilnadensis sp. nov and P. biharensis sp. nov. and a key to all known Indian species is provided.
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Project description:BACKGROUND:Temnothorax (Formicidae: Myrmicinae) is a diverse genus of ants found in a broad spectrum of ecosystems across the northern hemisphere. These diminutive ants have long served as models for social insect behavior, leading to discoveries about social learning and inspiring hypotheses about the process of speciation and the evolution of social parasitism. This genus is highly morphologically and behaviorally diverse, and this has caused a great deal of taxonomic confusion in recent years. Past efforts to estimate the phylogeny of this genus have been limited in taxonomic scope, leaving the broader evolutionary patterns in Temnothorax unclear. To establish the monophyly of Temnothorax, resolve the evolutionary relationships, reconstruct the historical biogeography and investigate trends in the evolution of key traits, I generated, assembled, and analyzed two molecular datasets: a traditional multi-locus Sanger sequencing dataset, and an ultra-conserved element (UCE) dataset. Using maximum likelihood, Bayesian, and summary-coalescent based approaches, I analyzed 22 data subsets consisting of 103 ingroup taxa and a maximum of 1.8 million base pairs in 2485 loci. RESULTS:The results of this study suggest an origin of Temnothorax at the Eocene-Oligocene transition, concerted transitions to arboreal nesting habits in several clades during the Oligocene, coinciding with ancient global cooling, and several convergent origins of social parasitism in the Miocene and Pliocene. As with other Holarctic taxa, Temnothorax has a history of migration across Beringia during the Miocene. CONCLUSIONS:Temnothorax is corroborated as a natural group, and the notion that many of the historical subgeneric and species group concepts are artificial is reinforced. The strict form of Emery's Rule, in which a socially parasitic species is sister to its host species, is not well supported in Temnothorax.
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