Insect galls from Serra Geral, Caetité, BA, Brazil

Abstract

We inventoried and characterized the kinds of gall, gall-inducing insects and host plants from Serra Geral between August 2013 and July 2014. Two phytophysiognomies, cerrado sensu stricto and caatinga-cerrado, were examined monthly along transects during ca. 4 hours per visit, totaling 48 hours of sampling effort. A total of 49 gall morphotypes were found on 14 species of host plants in 18 genera and 13 families. Fabaceae and Malpighiaceae were the families with the most galls, with 22 and 10 gall morphotypes, respectively. The genera of host plant with the greatest richness of galls were Copaifera L. (n ¼ 10), Bauhinia Benth. (n ¼ 6), and Mimosa L. (n ¼ 5). Galls were found on leaves, buds and stems. The majority of the galls were globoid, glabrous, isolated, and one-chambered. The inducers belong to Coleoptera, Diptera, and Lepidoptera, Cecidomyiidae (Diptera) being the most frequent and diverse gall-inducers. The associated fauna included parasitoids (Hymenoptera), successors (Formicidae), and predators (Pseudoscorpiones), obtained from 13, 2, and 1 gall morphotypes, respectively. Five plant taxa are recorded as hosts of gall-inducing insects for the first time.

Occurrence and characterization of insect galls in the Floresta Nacional de Silvânia, Brazil

“…Our results are in agreement with previous studies in the Brazilian savannas that point the dominance of gall-midges as gallers (Maia & Fernandes, 2004;Santos et al, 2010;Araújo et al, 2011Araújo et al, , 2014bNogueira et al, 2016;Urso-Guimarães et al, 2016). Cecidomyiidae is considered the main galling insect group in the world with more of 6,000 known species (Gagné & Jaschhof, 2014), and a huge estimated number of species not yet known (Araújo et al, 2014a;GrandezRios et al, 2015).…”

“…There is the expectation that et al (1988) the higher the species number in the plant family higher is the galling diversity that they host (Araújo, 2011;Gonçalves-Alvim & Fernandes, 2001). Additionally, we found that the host plants of the genera Protium (Burseraceae), Siparuna (Siparunaceae), Serjania (Sapindaceae) and Bauhinia (Fabaceae) were the most diverse in insect gall morphotypes, in line with recent studies in the Brazilian Cerrado (Silva et al, 2015;Nogueira et al, 2016;Urso-Guimarães et al, 2016). Insect gall morphotypes vary greatly in the occurrence and morphology, which can be explained by high specificity of gall-inducing insects associated to their host plants (Carneiro et al, 2009a).…”

“…We found hymenopteran parasitoids from several families in 20% of the gall morphotypes. Hymenopteran parasitoids are very frequent in Neotropical insect galls (Araújo et al, 2014a) and are among the main causes of galler mortality (Maia & Azevedo, 2009 Santos, 2006;Santos et al, 2010;Araújo et al, 2014b;Nogueira et al, 2016) and Asteraceae (Carneiro et al, 2009b;Fernandes et al, 1997;Malves & Frieiro-Costa, 2012) as the most important host families, which were also observed in the present study. Araújo et al (2014a) discussed that the main explanation for the high insect gall richness hosted by Fabaceae and Asteraceae in the Cerrado is its high number of plant species.…”

Insect galls of the Floresta da Cicuta (Volta Redonda, RJ, Brazil)

“…Previous records: Galls on Mimosa spp. were recorded in Caetité (BA) (Nogueira et al, 2016), Paramirim (PE) , Xingó (Northeast region) (CarvalhoFernandes et al, 2012), Ceará (Gagné & Jaschhof, 2014), Rio Grande do Sul (Mendonça et al, 2014), Grumari (RJ) (Oliveira & Maia, 2005).…”

Morphological characterization of insect galls and new records of associated invertebrates in a Cerrado area in Bahia State, Brazil

“…The areas of the Cerrado biome are indicated as having high species richness, but due to its large territory, Coelho et al (2013) pointed that there are many gaps to be filled in regard to its local biodiversity. For Bahia, information about the occurrence of galling insects is scarce (Nogueira et al, 2016), and recent studies have focused on Caatinga and Caatinga-Cerrado transition areas (Carvalho-Fernandes et al, 2012;Costa et al, 2014).…”