Diverse cuticular hydrocarbons from Australian canebeetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae)

Abstract

Cuticular hydrocarbon components in beetles of six Australian melolonthines whose larvae damage sugarcane, Antitrogus parvulus (Britton), A. consanguineus (Blackburn), Lepidiota negatoria (Blackburn), L. picticollis (Lea), L. noxia (Britton) and Dermolepida alborhirtum (Arrow), are identified and compared. These species demonstrate species-specific cuticular hydrocarbon profiles with a number of unprecedented structures. Major components have been identified as polymethylated hydrocarbons, 3-methyl substituted n-alkanes, 9,10-allenes and the corresponding C9 alkenes. The similarity of these compounds shows some correlation with the phylogeny of the beetles, but two polymethylated C22 hydrocarbons are unique to A. parvulus. One C25 allene is shown to have a potential role in mate recognition in A. consanguineus.

Chemosystematics Using Cuticular Compounds: A Powerful Tool to Separate Species in Mediterranean Dung Beetles (Coleoptera: Geotrupidae)

“…The present study shows that the 12 studied species of dung beetle have distinct chemical profiles of CCs, and their use as systematic characters has demonstrated to be very useful to distinguish genera and species in this specific group of Coleoptera. These CCs are similar to those observed in other groups of insects ( Gongyin et al 2007 , Fletcher et al 2008 , Baracchi et al 2009 ). Our results demonstrated that the cuticular hydrocarbon profile of 7 of the 12 dung beetle species included in this study (namely, B. gallicus , G. spiniger , J. nitidus , Ty.…”

“… Jacob and Hanssen (1986) published one of the first studies demonstrating the use of CCs as taxonomic characters for the chemotaxonomy in Coleoptera. Since then, various studies on Coleoptera families showed that these cuticular characters were species specific within a family, such as in Tenebrionidae ( Lockey 1992 ), Curculionidae ( Page et al 1997 , Howard and Perez-Lachaud 2002 ), Staphylinidae ( Lusebrink et al 2007 ), and Scarabaeidae ( Fletcher et al 2008 ).…”

Cuticular hydrocarbons for the identification and geographic assignment of empty puparia of forensically important flies

“…Chemotaxonomy within the field of entomology has been around for many years, and it is widely accepted that CHC analysis provides an excellent means of species identification across a broad range of insect orders like Hymenoptera [15,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32], Isoptera [14,33], Blattodea [31,34,35] and Coleoptera [28][29][30]. CHC analysis has also been used for Diptera [7,22,31,[36][37][38][39], providing a complementary technique when the taxonomical identification is ambiguous or even not feasible, which could be due to the damaged physical condition or DNA degradation, or quite simply because the morphology between particular species is too similar to identify them [22,40].…”

“…Cuticular hydrocarbons (CHC) as a means of species identification has been studied for decades and is used to discriminate between different insect taxa [ 14 , 15 ]. Their epicuticular wax layer is consisting of hydrocarbons, fatty acids, alcohols, waxes, glycerides, phospholipids and glycolipids.…”

Rhinoceros beetle (Trypoxylus dichotomus) cuticular hydrocarbons contain information about body size and sex

“…Peak identifications should be considered hypotheses and although they are consistent with published data, it was not the focus of this paper to conduct exhaustive identification of compounds. Prediction of peak identities were made by comparing RIs and diagnostic ions to the MS data of identified CHCs in other studies and the NIST14 (National Institute of Standards & Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, USA) library database [34][35][36][37][38]. Double bond locations were not identified.…”