Coelosynapha, a new genus of the subfamily Gnoristinae (Diptera: Mycetophilidae) with a circumpolar, Holarctic distribution

Abstract

The subfamily Gnoristinae is one of the most diverse and taxonomically difficult subfamilies of Mycetophilidae, with new species and genera being described almost every year from various parts of the world. Through inventories of fungus gnats in the Nordic Region and Russia, a genus and species new to science was discovered, yet with links back to an illustration made by the late French entomologist Loïc Matile in the 1980s. DNA barcoding aligned it with yet another species new to science, distributed across Canada and documented through The Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD) by Paul D. N. Hebert and colleagues at the BOLD team. The new Holarctic genus, Coelosynapha gen. n. is described, consisting of two new species, the Palaearctic Coelosynapha loici sp. n. and the Nearctic Coelosynapha heberti sp. n. DNA-barcodes assign the two new species to distinctly separated (8.27% p-distance) Barcode Index Numbers (BINs) which are most closely aligned to unidentified species of Mycetophilidae from South Australia and Costa Rica on BOLD. The new genus shows morphological characteristics in between the two Holarctic genera Coelosia Winnertz, 1864 and Synapha Meigen, 1818 and further shows affinity to the southern continents genus Austrosynapha Tonnoir, 1929. The Palaearctic Coelosynapha loici sp. n., for which habitat requirements are best documented, is largely restricted to pristine, old-growth conifer (mostly spruce, Picea abies ssp. obovata) forests within the boreal vegetation zone, although it is also recorded from hummock tundra along the Anadyr River in Far East Russia.

Current State of DNA Barcoding of Sciaroidea (Diptera)—Highlighting the Need to Build the Reference Library

“…This started with the use of DNA barcodes to associate immature stages [34] and females [35] to morphologically identify males. Later, DNA barcodes were increasingly used as a tool to aid in the discrimination of species for the families Mycetophilidae [36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46], Sciaridae [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58], Cecidomyiidae [59][60][61][62][63], Keroplatidae [41,64,65], Ditomyiidae [66], and for a few taxa with an uncertain and contentious family placement often referred to as the Sciaroidea incertae sedis group [67,68]. DNA barcodes have also been shown to be a very efficient tool to associate females with identified males [35,.…”

“…For Sciaroidea as a whole, such a task has the potential to more than triple the known world fauna without much additional sampling. Examples of such "integrative barcode revisions" on a small scale include the recent revision of the Exechia parva group by Lindemann et al [45] and the description of the genus Coelosynapha by Kjaerandsen et al [44]. In both of these studies, the BOLD archive was used extensively to borrow barcoded vouchers and, in this way, included species from North America in the revisionary work.…”

Two new species of Neuratelia Rondani (Diptera: Mycetophilidae) from Chukotka, North-East Russia

“…Finally, terminalia were placed in glycerine vials and pinned together with the rest of the specimen, which was preliminary dried by xylol and amyl acetate baths (Achterberg, 2009). Morphological terminology follows Kjaerandsen et al (2020) for body and wings, and Kurina et al (2015) for male terminalia. Materials are stored at the following collections: SZMN -Siberian Zoological Museum of the Institute of Systematics and Ecology of Animals, Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences (Novosibirsk, Russia), TMU -The Arctic University Museum of Norway (Tromsø, Norway).…”