ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2008
Extreme diversity of tropical parasitoid wasps exposed by iterative integration of natural history, DNA barcoding, morphology, and collections.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 188 papers.
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188 citing papers in PubMed, 598 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Anomalous latitudinal gradients in parasitoid wasp diversity-Hotspots in regions with larger temperature range.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- A Reassessment of Phylogenetic Relationships in Class Oligohymenophorea (Protista, Ciliophora) Based on Updated Multigene Data.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
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- A new genus and a new species in the tribe Eryciini (Diptera, Tachinidae) from Area de Conservación Guanacaste in north-western Costa Rica.Biodiversity data journal · 2025Article
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- Delimiting species, revealing cryptic diversity, and population divergence in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau weevils through DNA barcoding.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- A molecular approach to unravel trophic interactions between parasitoids and hyperparasitoids associated with pecan aphids.Journal of insect science (Online) · 2024Article
- DNA barcoding for the assessment of marine and coastal fish diversity from the Coast of Mozambique.PloS one · 2024Article
- Description of a new species ofZooKeys · 2024Article
128 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We DNA barcoded 2,597 parasitoid wasps belonging to 6 microgastrine braconid genera reared from parapatric tropical dry forest, cloud forest, and rain forest in Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG) in northwestern Costa Rica and combined these data with records of caterpillar hosts and morphological analyses. We asked whether barcoding and morphology discover the same provisional species and whether the biological entities revealed by our analysis are congruent with wasp host specificity. Morphological analysis revealed 171 provisional species, but barcoding exposed an additional 142 provisional species; 95% of the total is likely to be undescribed. These 313 provisional species are extraordinarily host specific; more than 90% attack only 1 or 2 species of caterpillars out of more than 3,500 species sampled. The most extreme case of overlooked diversity is the morphospecies Apanteles leucostigmus. This minute black wasp with a distinctive white wing stigma was thought to parasitize 32 species of ACG hesperiid caterpillars, but barcoding revealed 36 provisional species, each attacking one or a very few closely related species of caterpillars. When host records and/or within-ACG distributions suggested that DNA barcoding had missed a species-pair, or when provisional species were separated only by slight differences in their barcodes, we examined nuclear sequences to test hypotheses of presumptive species boundaries and to further probe host specificity. Our iterative process of combining morphological analysis, ecology, and DNA barcoding and reiteratively using specimens maintained in permanent collections has resulted in a much more fine-scaled understanding of parasitoid diversity and host specificity than any one of these elements could have produced on its own.
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