Wasps going north? Triteleia peyerimhoffi (Hymenoptera: Platygastroidea: Scelionidae) in Germany

Abstract

Triteleia peyerimhoffi (Kieffer, 1906) is the only species of its genus that is known from Europe, and it has proven to be a remarkably variable scelionid. PoPovici et al. ( 2011) conducted a comprehensive study on the taxonomy, nomenclature and morphology of this species, their results showing an unusually high intraspecific variation correlated with a circum-Mediterranean geographic distribution. These authors expressed their concern that morphological variants of T. peyerimhoffi could be erroneously interpreted as separate species, which would lead to taxonomic confusion and shift the focus from important and interesting unexplored topics.An easy and straightforward solution is COI barcode referencing, but so far, no sequences of T. peyerimhoffi had been published and only one genome assembly is available in GenBank for the genus (ASM2281694v1; SayerS et al. 2022). The incompleteness of the Barcode of Life Database (BOLD) and, on occasion, inaccurately identified records do not make this task easier. At the time of writing (November 2022), BOLD held 69,074 public records of Scelionidae, with only 4,580 of them associated with species names (ratnaSingham & hebert 2013), representing 426 of the over 3,500 described species (awad 2023). At the same time, GenBank stored 14,711 barcodes for Scelionidae, of which more than 10,000 belong to only two genera: Telenomus Haliday and Trissolcus Ashmead (SayerS et al. 2022).The databases are slowly accumulating valuable information, but there is still a long way to go until any spe-