Hidden in plain sight: first records of the alien earwig Euborellia femoralis (Dohrn, 1863) in Europe

A new greenhouse invader: the first report of the alien ring-legged earwig, Euborellia annulipes (Dermaptera, Anisolabididae) in Serbia, with the first checklist of earwigs of the country

“…From autochthonous species of dermapterans that are inhabiting Serbia, E. annulipes can be easily separated by general appearance, uniformly dark body color, except legs, completely reduced tegmina and wings (at least in specimens recorded in Europe) and bicoloured antennae -mostly black, with a few pale subapical antennomeres. From other Euborellia Burr, 1910 species recorded in Europe, E. annulipes can be separated using the identification key provided in Kalaentzis et al (2021): tegmina and wings are fully missing, and the first antennomere is distinctly shorter than the length of antennomeres 2-4 combined.…”

“…Specimens were collected by hand and using entomological tweezers. Identification of species was performed using the keys provided in Kalaentzis et al (2021). Given that E. annulipes is considered a new model for insect oogenesis and developmental biology research (Núñez-Pascual et al 2022), one male and one female were left alive and are currently being held at the University of Belgrade -Faculty of Biology, for the purpose of establishing the population for future research.…”

“…In Europe, there is four earwig families, viz. Anisolabididae, Forficulidae, Labiduridae and Spongiphoridae, among which eight species are allochthonous, and many of them are synanthropic and can be found inside greenhouses or similar buildings with suitable living conditions: Euborellia annulata (Fabricius, 1787), E. annulipes (Lucas, 1847), E. arcanum Matzke & Kočárek, 2015, E. femoralis (Dohrn, 1863, Forficula lucasi Dohrn, 1865, Marava arachidis (Yersin, 1860), Nala lividipes (Dufour, 1828) and Paralabellula curvicauda (Motschulsky, 1863) (Harz and Kaltenbach 1976;Kočárek 2009;Rasplus and Roques 2010;Matzke and Kočárek 2015;Matzke 2018;Kalaentzis et al 2021;Zafeiriou et al 2021).…”

Identification and reproductive isolation of Euborellia species (Insecta, Dermaptera, Anisolabididae) from East and Southeast Asia

“…Interestingly, our molecular analysis revealed that this species is sister to E. femoralis (Fig. 6), for which only totally apterous or fully winged individuals have been reported (Bey-Bienko 1959;Anisyutkin 1998;Kalaentzis et al 2021). Although Steinmann (1989a, b) treated the brachypterous species Anisolabis minuta Caudell, 1907 (= E. minuta) as a junior system of E. femoralis, this treatment lacks foundation (Srivastava 2003).…”

Time to restart: Study of the Dermaptera of the Indian subcontinent

“…To identify closely related species, DNA barcoding is effective. The universal primer set, LCO1490 and HCO2198, which have been designed to amplify an approximately 700 base-pair region of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) gene (Folmer et al, 1994), usually works well in most of the extant dermapteran taxa (Stuart et al, 2019;Kalaentzis et al, 2021;Kočárek and Wahab, 2021; Y K, unpublished data). Ethyl acetate vapour is often used to kill insect samples including Dermaptera to avoid subsequent rotting and hardening of the body.…”