Hiding in plain sight: DNA barcoding suggests cryptic species in all ‘well-known’ Australian flower beetles (Scarabaeidae: Cetoniinae)

Abstract

DNA barcode data is presented for Australian cetoniine flower beetles to aid with species discovery and guide revisionary taxonomy. Sequences of the COI gene’s DNA barcode region were acquired from 284 cetoniine specimens, covering 68 described species and 33 genera. This equates to 48% of the known species and 83% of the genera which occur in Australia. Results suggest up to 27 putative undescribed species in our sample, only 11 of which were suspected to be undescribed before this study, leaving 16 unexpected (“cryptic”) species. The Australian cetoniine fauna may hence be increased by up to 19%. An unanticipated result of the work is that each of the five most visible and commonly collected Australian cetoniine species, Eupoecila australasiae (Donovan, 1805), Neorrhina punctatum (Donovan, 1805), Glycyphana (Glycyphaniola) stolata (Fabricius, 1781), Chondropyga dorsalis (Donovan, 1805) and Bisallardiana gymnopleura (Fischer, 1823), have unexpectedly high diversity in DNA barcode sequences and were consequently split into multiple clusters, possibly indicating the presence of cryptic species.

Cryptic diversity of Oxythyrea flower chafers and its implication for conservation of non‐forest biotopes in the Balkans

“…The rates of genetic diversification between O. dulcis lineages ranged from 5.13 to 7.32% (cox1), which is comparable with the reported interspecific distances (4.4 to 18.6%) of other flower chafers (Audisio et al, 2009;Ahrens et al, 2013;Lee et al, 2015;Seidel 2016;Vondráček, Fuchsová, et al, 2018;Mitchell et al, 2020;De Palma et al, 2020). For comparison, the intraspecific cox1 genetic distances were reported between 0.1 and 3.5%.…”

“…For comparison, the intraspecific cox1 genetic distances were reported between 0.1 and 3.5%. However, several species exhibit larger intraspecific variability reaching up to 6.2% (Ahrens et al, 2013; Mitchell et al, 2020). All four O. dulcis lineages have also been identified as separate groups in the ABGD, TCS and bPTP analyses.…”

Online community photo-sharing in entomology: a large-scale review with suggestions on best practices

“…Publications that were scored for “Abundance” used community photographs to determine or discuss arthropod abundance or commonness, either without quantified comparisons to other data (Mitchell et al 2020), relative to community photograph data (Friesen and Zhang 2021, James 2021, Rivest and Kharouba 2021) or other digitized data such as GBIF (Pino Pérez et al 2020), or in comparison to standardized data such as pheromone trap collections (Wainwright et al 2020).…”

A DNA barcode survey of insect biodiversity in Pakistan

“…The effectiveness of the Barcode Index Number (BIN) system ( Ratnasingham & Hebert, 2013 ) as a species proxy ( Hausmann et al, 2013 ) has made it possible to rapidly evaluate species diversity, enabling large-scale biotic inventories ( Hebert et al, 2016 ; Wirta et al, 2016 ). Because BINs show close congruence with species boundaries established through morphological study ( Ortiz et al, 2017 ; Huemer et al, 2019 ) they can be used to delineate newly encountered species ( Mitchell, Moeseneder & Hutchinson, 2020 ), to discern cryptic species ( Zahiri et al, 2017 ; Zhou et al, 2019 ), to plot species distributions ( Ren et al, 2018 ), to estimate species richness in bulk samples ( Andújar et al, 2018 ; Braukmann et al, 2019 ), to analyze museum collections ( Pentinsaari et al, 2020 ), and to assess faunal similarity at regional and global scales ( Ashfaq et al, 2017 ).…”