First record of Phlebotomine sandflies (Diptera: Psychodidae) in the Comoros Archipelago with description ofSergentomyia (Vattieromyia) pessonin. sp. andS. (rondanomyia) goodmani comorensisn. ssp.

Abstract

No Phlebotomine sandflies had ever been reported in the Comoros Archipelago, including the three islands of the Republic of the Union of Comoros (Grande Comore, Mohéli and Anjouan) and the French oversea department of Mayotte. During three field surveys carried out in 2003, 2007 and 2011, we provided the first record of Phlebotomine sandflies in this area. A total of 85 specimens belonging to three species were caught: a new species S. (Vattieromyia) pessoni n. sp. (two females from Grande Comore), a new subspecies of Sergentomyia (Rondanomyia) goodmani (80 specimens from Grande Comore and one from Anjouan) and Grassomyia sp. (two females from Mohéli). The individualisation of these taxa was inferred both from morphological criteria and sequencing of a part of the cytochrome b of the mitochondrial DNA. These taxa are closely related to Malagasy sandflies.

Molecular systematics applied to Phlebotomine sandflies: Review and perspectives

“…A first category includes description of new taxa for Science using molecular biology to be sure that males and females belong to the same taxa (Depaquit et al, , 2008aMuller et al, 2007;Léger et al, 2012Léger et al, , 2014Zapata et al, 2012a;. A second category includes publications describing new species for Science on one gender only and sequences are provided as a tool for a future description of the hitherto unknown gender (Depaquit et al, 2004b;Randrianambinintsoa et al, 2012;. Thirdly, in four publications, DNA sequences have been used to associate males and females in existing species (Depaquit et al, 2004a;Khadri et al, 2008;Parvizi et al, 2010b;Zhang et al, 2013).…”

“…A total of 55 papers comparing different species or subspecies within a genus has been recorded (Booth et al, 1991(Booth et al, , 1994Adamson et al, 1993;Maingon et al, 1993;Esseghir et al, 1997;Marcondes et al, 1997;Aransay et al, 2000;Depaquit et al, 2000Depaquit et al, , 2005bDepaquit et al, , 2008aDepaquit et al, ,b, 2014Di Muccio et al, 2000;Esseghir and Ready, 2000;Mukhopadhyay et al, 2000;Soto et al, 2001;Lins et al, 2002;Mazzoni et al, 2002Mazzoni et al, , 2006Mazzoni et al, , 2008Testa et al, 2002;Torgerson et al, 2003;Beati et al, 2004;Pesson et al, 2004;Moin-Vaziri et al, 2007a;Bounamous et al, 2008Bounamous et al, , 2014Perez-Doria et al, 2008a;Absavaran et al, 2009;Kuwahara et al, 2009;Vivero et al, 2009;Azpurua et al, 2010;Franco et al, 2010;Khalid et al, 2010Khalid et al, , 2012Parvizi et al, 2010a,b;Belen et al, 2011;Kruger et al, 2011;Latrofa et al, 2011a,b;Kumar et al, 2012;Randrianambinintsoa et al, 2012Jafari et al, 2013;…”

“…Cytochrome b (cyt b), complete or not, with or without partial flanking NADH1 and tRNA-ser is the most commonly used (Table 1 and Fig. 2) (Esseghir et al, 1997;Marcondes et al, 1997;Esseghir and Ready, 2000;Hodgkinson et al, 2002Hodgkinson et al, , 2003Testa et al, 2002;Aransay et al, 2003;Torgerson et al, 2003;Pesson et al, 2004;Yahia et al, 2004;Depaquit et al, 2005aDepaquit et al, , 2007Depaquit et al, , 2008aDepaquit et al, , 2013Depaquit et al, , 2014Perrotey et al, 2005;Hamarsheh et al, 2007;Moin-Vaziri et al, 2007a,b;Muller et al, 2007;Vivero et al, 2007Vivero et al, , 2009; Baron et al, 2008;Bounamous et al, 2008Bounamous et al, , 2014Perez-Doria et al, 2008a;Absavaran et al, 2009;Bejarano et al, 2009;Franco et al, 2010;Mahamdallie et al, 2010;Parvizi et al, 2010a,b;Belen et al, 2011;Dvorak et al, 2011;Kruger et al, 2011;Latrofa et al, 2011a,b;Cohnstaedt et al, 2012;Léger et al, 2012Léger et al, , 2014Randrianambinintsoa et al, 2012…”

“…-Algeria (Bounamous et al, 2008Depaquit et al, 2008bDepaquit et al, , 2013Depaquit et al, , 2014Franco et al, 2010), -Benin , -Burkina Faso: (Depaquit et al, 2005a(Depaquit et al, , 2008b, -Cameroon , -the Comoros (Randrianambinintsoa et al, 2012), -Egypt (Booth et al, 1991;Esseghir et al, 1997;Depaquit et al, 2000Depaquit et al, , 2008bDepaquit et al, , 2014Esseghir and Ready, 2000;Elnaiem et al, 2005;Hamarsheh et al, 2007;Khalid et al, 2012;Minter et al, 2013), -Ethiopia (Esseghir et al, 1997;Esseghir and Ready, 2000;Seblova et al, 2013), -the Republic of Guinea , -Kenya (Mukhopadhyay et al, 2000;Esseghir et al, 1997;Depaquit et al, 1998Depaquit et al, , 2000Depaquit et al, , 2008bEsseghir and Ready, 2000), -Madagascar (Depaquit et al, 2004a(Depaquit et al, ,b, 2007(Depaquit et al, , 2008aRandrianambinintsoa et al, 2012, -Mali (Khalid et al, 2010), -Morocco (Esseghir et al, 1997;Di Muccio et al, 2000;Pesson et al, 2004;Yahia et al, 2004;Hamarsheh et al, 2007;Moin-Vaziri et al, 2007a;Baron et al, 2008;Franco et al, 2010;…”

“…Without taking into account the problems of the definitions and limits of the subgenera Rondanomyia and Neophlebotomus (Léger et al, 2005), only two species belonging to the first group have been processed: Sergentomyia goodmani (Randrianambinintsoa et al, 2012) and its subspecies Sergentomyia goodmani comorensis (Randrianambinintsoa et al, 2012).…”