The Mt Halimun-Salak Malaise Trap project - releasing the most species rich DNA Barcode library for Indonesia

Abstract

The Indonesian archipelago features an extraordinarily rich biota. However, the actual taxonomic inventory of the archipelago remains highly incomplete and there is hardly any significant taxonomic activity that utilises recent technological advances. The IndoBioSys project was established as a biodiversity information system aiming at, amongst other goals, creating inventories of the Indonesian entomofauna using DNA barcoding. Here, we release the first large scale assessment of the megadiverse insect groups that occur in the Mount Halimun-Salak National Park, one of the largest tropical rain-forest ecosystem in West Java, with a focus on Hymenoptera, Coleoptera, Diptera and Lepidoptera collected with Malaise traps. From September 2015 until April 2016, 34 Malaise traps were placed in different localities in the south-eastern part of the Halimun-Salak National Park. A total of 4,531 specimens were processed for DNA barcoding and in total, 2,382 individuals produced barcode compliant records, representing 1,195 exclusive BINs or putative species in 98 insect families. A total of 1,149 BINs were new to BOLD. Of 1,195 BINs detected, 804 BINs were singletons and more than 90% of the BINs incorporated less than five specimens. The astonishing heterogeneity of BINs, as high as 1.1 exclusive BIN per specimen of Diptera successfully processed, shows that the cost/benefit relationship of the discovery of new species in those areas is very low. In four genera of Chalcidoidea, a superfamily of the Hymenoptera, the number of discovered species was higher than the number of species known from Indonesia, suggesting that our samples contain many species that are new to science. Those numbers shows how fast molecular pipelines contribute substantially to the objective inventorying of the fauna giving us a good picture of how potentially diverse tropical areas might be.

DNA barcoding data release for the Phoridae (Insecta, Diptera) of the Halimun-Salak National Park (Java, Indonesia)

“…All fieldwork and laboratory procedures were conducted in the framework of IndoBioSys. These are presented in Schmidt et al (2017) , Cancian de Araujo et al (2018a) . Steps that are specific to the analysis of Phoridae are described below.…”

“…Malaise traps are commonly used for sampling of terrestrial insects because they provide standardised sampling, are very effective at capturing flying insects and are easy to use ( Matthews and Matthews 2017 , Schmidt et al 2019 ). Previous taxon-specific data releases demonstrate the extreme species-richness of these and other sites that have been sampled in the framework of IndoBioSys (see Cancian de Araujo et al (2018a) , Cancian de Araujo et al (2018b) , Cancian de Araujo et al (2019) , Schmidt et al (2019) , Hilgert et al (2019) ).…”

“…Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelago, comprising over 17,000 islands and 95,000 kilometres of coastline ( Cleary and DeVantier 2011 , Cancian de Araujo et al 2018b ). Located off the coast of mainland Southeast Asia in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, it lies across the Equator and links two major biogeographic regions: the Oriental and Australasian ( Cleary and DeVantier 2011 , Cancian de Araujo et al 2018a , Kitchener et al 2004 , Indonesia’s tropical climate, geological complexity and extensive territory makes it one of the world’s most biodiverse countries, both for marine and terrestrial organisms and it also harbours high levels of endemism ( Cleary and DeVantier 2011 ). Unfortunately, Indonesia is also renowned for the rate of its biodiversity loss and, as this country has received much less research attention in comparison to others of tropical settings, quantifying this loss is especially difficult ( Cleary and DeVantier 2011 , Kitchener et al 2004 ).…”

New species of Myolepta Newman, 1838 (Diptera, Syrphidae) from the Indomalayan Realm

“…nov.), and that we only know both sexes of one species (M. himalayana). A recent publication of a DNA Barcode library from Mount Halimun-Salak (West Java, Indonesia) reports that almost 70% of their BINs (Barcode Index Number; Ratnasingham & Hebert 2013) were singletons and more than 90% had less than five specimens (Cancian de Araujo et al 2018)…”

Abundant, diverse, unknown: Extreme species richness and turnover despite drastic undersampling in two closely placed tropical Malaise traps

“…In a joint project with the Andalas University, two Malaise traps were deployed in Padang, Sumatra, Indonesia, and operated for three months each. Insect communities in tropical regions are notorious for being extraordinarily diverse [ 11 , 27 , 28 ] yet severely understudied [ 29 , 30 ], making the large-scale sequencing of the Malaise traps contents especially interesting. In this study, we present and evaluate the sequencing results recovered for each Malaise trap.…”