Species of Geotrupidae (Coleoptera: Scarabaeoidea) in Aquidauana, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil

Abstract

Coleoptera of the family Geotrupidae play an important ecological role in the decomposition of animal and plant organic matter. In Brazil there is little information on the diversity and distribution of this group, thus, this work had a purpose to study Geotrupidae species, occurring in Aquidauana, MS. A survey for geotrupids was conducted in Aquidauana, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Beetles were captured using a light trap over a period of two years, from January 2006 to December 2007. A total of 907 specimens were collected and identified to eight species. From the subfamily Bolboceratinae, the species identified were Bolbapium minutum (Luederwaldt, 1929) and Pereirabolbus castaneus (Klug, 1845). In the subfamily Athyreinae the species identified were Athyreus bilobus Howden & Martínez, 1978, Parathyreus aff. bahiae, Neoathyreus aff. julietae, N. sexdentatus Laporte, 1840, N. centromaculatus (Felsche, 1909 and N. goyasensis (Boucomont, 1902). Four species (A. bilobus, N. centromaculatus, N. goyasensis and P. castaneus) are reported for the first time in Aquidauana, MS, Brazil. The most abundant species, representing 85.9% of the total capture, was B. minutum. The greatest numbers of specimens was caught from October to December of both years of the study.

Seasonality and distribution of Coleoptera families (Arthropoda, Insecta) in the Cerrado of Central Brazil

“…The eight families recorded only during the rainy season (Cantharidae, Erotylidae, Rhysodidae, Geotrupidae, Mordellidae, Trogidae, Histeridae, and Phengodidae) are characterized by representatives that feed on nectar and pollen (Cantharidae), fungi (Erotylidae and Rhysodidae), decomposing organic matter (Geotrupidae, Mordellidae, Trogidae), or are predators (Histeridae, Phengodidae). Most of these resources are associated with the rainy season, and other studies have also pointed out that some of these families are more abundant during this period (Zaragoza-Caballero, 2004;Correa et al, 2013;Rodrigues and Puker, 2013).…”

“…In the Cerrado biome, several studies have focused on specific Coleoptera families, for example, Bostrichidae and Curculionidae (Rocha et al, 2011), Cerambycidae (Evangelista et al, 2021), Cetoniidae (Evangelista Neto et al, 2018), Geotrupidae (Rodrigues and Puker, 2013), and Scarabaeidae (Almeida and Louzada, 2009;Nunes et al, 2012;Silva et al, 2020). Most of these studies have evaluated how anthropic impacts, such as urbanization (Correa et al, 2019a(Correa et al, , 2021Frizzas et al, 2020), habitat fragmentation (Pimenta and De Marco, 2015;Silva et al, 2020) and land use (Martello et al, 2016;Correa et al, 2019b;Oliveira et al, 2021), have affected the beetle community.…”