Diving beetles of the genusLiodessusGuignot, 1953 in Colombia, with description of three new species (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae)

A new Colombian species of Liodessus diving beetles from the Páramo de Sumapaz (Coleoptera, Dytiscidae, Bidessini)

“…Comparative notes. The species is well characterized by its small size (2.0-2.1 mm total length, shorter than most other Colombian Páramo species (Megna et al 2019;Balke et al 2021) except L. lacunaviridis (Balke et al 2021)); dark coloration, discontinuous habitus, shiny surface of pronotum and elytrae, presence of distinct occipital line, distinct basal pronotal striae with short or even faint basal elytral striae. We assembled sequences of the Colombian species, trimming the sequence ends to avoid missing characters.…”

“…However, diving beetles from the high altitudes of the Puna and Páramo regions re main poorly studied. Since 2019, as the result of a research and training cooperation between our institutions, 10 new species were described from these regions of Peru (Balke et al 2019(Balke et al , 2020b and Colombia (Megna et al 2019;Balke et al 2021). It became apparent that many more new species of Liodessus remain to be discovered in the vast Andean highland ecosystems, most of them likely en demic to one or a few Páramo or Puna areas, respective ly.…”

Two new species of Liodessus Guignot, 1939 diving beetles from Northern Peru (Coleoptera, Dytiscidae, Hydroporinae)

“…We use the standard genetic marker for molecular biodiversity assessment, the 5' end of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase 1 gene (cox1 or CO1), also referred to as the "DNA barcode" (Hebert et al 2003) (also see the comprehensive background data in the BOLD Handbook under boldsystems.org for technical details). We are aware that this is only a single marker which is not related to speciation (Kwong et al 2012), with known issues for species delineation, including in Dytiscidae (Hawlitschek et al 2012;Hendrich et al 2010), but have found the approach very useful in many lineages at the species and even population level (Hendrich et al 2010;Lam et al 2018;Megna et al 2019). Careful cross checking of morphological and molecular taxonomic evidence is the foundation of our investigation.…”

“…There are 32 species of Liodessus Guignot, 1939 known from the Americas. Twelve of these have been recorded from the Andean region (Balke et al 2020;Megna et al 2019;Nilsson and Hájek 2020), but species from the high altitudes of the Páramo and Puna regions remain poorly studied. Only recently, several new species were described from above 2,800 m altitude (Balke et al 2020;Megna et al 2019).…”

“…Twelve of these have been recorded from the Andean region (Balke et al 2020;Megna et al 2019;Nilsson and Hájek 2020), but species from the high altitudes of the Páramo and Puna regions remain poorly studied. Only recently, several new species were described from above 2,800 m altitude (Balke et al 2020;Megna et al 2019). We suggested that many more new species of Liodessus remain to be discovered in the vast Andean highland ecosystem, most of them likely endemic to one or a few Páramo or Puna areas, respectively.…”