Extension of historical range of Betylobraconinae (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) into Palaearctic Region based on a Baltic amber fossil, and description of a new species of Mesocentrus Szépligeti from Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Two new species of the parasitic wasp genus Mesocentrus Szépligeti (Betylobraconinae) are described. One based on a new species from Papua New Guinea, the other the first Palaearctic member of the subfamily based on a 30+ mya, species from Baltic amber. The second species is illustrated using synchrotron X-ray microtomography. Whereas the extant Betylobraconinae are restricted to Australia, New Guinea and New Caledonia, their ancestral distribution is now known to have extended considerably further. A key to the four species of Mesocentrus known from Papua New Guinea is provided. Both species possess some putatively plesiomorphic characters absent in other extant Mesocentrus spp. The new extant species differs in having a considerably larger number of antennal segments and a less laterally depressed frons, while the extinct one has the clypeus separated from the face dorsally and strongly developed hypoclypeal depression. Availability of sequence data for this species enabled further analysis of the relationships of the subfamily, which we present in a phylogenetic analysis additionally including the release of a number of new sequences of related taxa.

A molecular and morphological reassessment of the phylogeny of the subfamily Ophioninae (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae)

“…The nucleotide substitution model settings were determined with jModeltest2 and Bayesian information criteria (Darriba et al ., ). The morphological characters were treated as an undivided partition, the CO1 characters were subdivided into two partitions codons 1–2 and codon 3, and the 28S D2–D3 characters were subdivided into four partitions according to the secondary structure of this region: D2p, D2u, D3p and D3u (p = paired, u = unpaired; Gillespie, Yoder & Wharton, ; Butcher et al ., ). All the ambiguous regions to align indicated as out by Gillespie et al ., (; NHR and RAA) were excluded.…”

The NOVA project: maximizing beam time efficiency through synergistic analyses of SRμCT data

“…Thomas van de Kamp investigates the functional morphology of insects (particularly joint systems). He is interested in the application of X-ray imaging for entomology [30][31][32][33] and paleontology [34][35][36][37][38][39][40] as well as digital visualization and 3D reconstruction of biological samples [41][42][43] . The TU Darmstadt is responsible for the coordination of the project, but is also involved in data acquisition, and analysis.…”

Systematics of the Neotropical braconid wasps of the Pedinotus genus group (Doryctinae)

“…Two simultaneous runs of 20 million generations each were carried out for each analysis using uniform priors and sampling trees every 1000 generations. The COI and wg markers were partitioned according to codon position, whereas the 28S gene was divided into two partitions, one for paired bases (stem regions) and the other one for unpaired ones (loop regions) (Butcher et al, 2014). The appropriate substitution model for each partition was selected based on the Bayesian information criterion implemented in jmodeltest version 2 (Darriba et al, 2012).…”