Four new species and new records of Platygastrinae (Hymenoptera: Platygastridae) from Iran

Abstract

The following four species new to science are described: Platygaster azarbaijanica Buhl & Asadi sp. nov., Platygaster lotfalizadehi Buhl & Asadi sp. nov., Platygaster karimpouri Asadi & Buhl sp. nov. and Synopeas calecai Buhl & Asadi sp. nov. Diagnostic characters are discussed, and figures are provided to distinguish the new species. In addition, ten species of Platygastrinae Howard, 1892 belonging to the genera Platygaster Latreille, 1809, Synopeas Förster, 1856 and Leptacis Förster, 1856 are reported as new records for the fauna of Iran. Four species of Platygaster and one species of Synopeas are recorded as ʻconferʼ.

A checklist of Platygastridae and Scelionidae (Hymenoptera, Platygastroidea) of Iran

“…The known assemblage of the Platygastridae in the country includes six species sporadically recorded from five provinces (Fig. 1A) (Ghahari & Hatami, 2000;Fallahzadeh et al, 2007;Ebrahimi, 2008;Buhl, 2015b) and 30 species recorded during more recent and intensive surveys of the northwestern provinces (Lotfalizadeh, 2018;Asadi-Farfar et al, 2016, 2020a, 2020b, 2021a, 2021b. The majority of the country remains unsurveyed.…”

“…For genera that have never been thoroughly revised in the Palaearctic, and for which many primary types have not been examined, this work must be done so that proper name usage is established. Very little was studied regarding the fauna of Platygastridae of Iran (Ghahari & Hatami, 2000;Fallahzadeh et al, 2007;Ebrahimi, 2008;Buhl, 2015b) until recent faunistic and taxonomic works in northwestern provinces revealed the presence of many species of Platygastridae, including new taxa (Lotfalizadeh, 2018;Asadi-Farfar et al, 2016, 2020a, 2020b, 2021a, 2021b.…”

First record of the genus Scelio (Hymenoptera: Platygastridae, Scelionidae, Scelioninae) egg parasitoids in tomato greenhouses of southeastern Algeria

“…In fact, parasitoid wasps of the genus Scelio (Latreille, 1805) are solitary and obligate parasites of Acrididae eggs in agricultural and natural habitats (Baker et al 1996;Dangerfield et al 2001;Yoder et al 2009Yoder et al , 2014, with a parasitism rate varied from 10% to 15% (Greathead et al 1994;Baker et al 1996). Despite their importance, these tiny wasps have been largely ignored and are still poorly known www.entsoc.gr © 2022 Hellenic Entomological Society in many countries due to classification difficulties (Buhl et al 2016), as well as the difficulty in accumulating new material of these species for re-examination them, especially in the African countries (Yoder et al 2014;Asadi-Farfar et al 2021).…”