A braconid wasp in the COSEWIC List?

The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) exists to provide Canadians and their governments with advice regarding the status of wildlife species that are nationally at risk of extinction or extirpation. Its committee of experts assesses and designates which wildlife species are in some danger of disappearing from the national territory. As part of  its work, COSEWIC produces a Candidate List of species. I strongly recommend to anyone interested in the protection of the Canadian nature to visit the COSEWIC website, and to support their work and that of similar organizations. [Disclaimer: I do not work for COSEWIC, nor I am involved with their efforts in any capacity].

My interest in COSEWIC, and the reason I am writing this post today is to discuss the POSSIBILITY of including a parasitoid Braconidae wasp within their list. Is that a real thing? Or am I just getting too excited with my subject of research?

Let's look at the facts and try to be impartial. COSEWIC List includes quite a few arthropods species. Which in itself is something truly amazing, especially in this world that usually focus its conservation efforts in large, charismatic fauna -conservation efforts also prioritize the flora, but I will leave plants out of this comment and will restrict myself to animals for the time being. 

Small animals, like insects, tend to be almost completely overlooked... unless they are "charismatic" by themselves, e.g. a beautiful butterfly, a conspicuous bumble bee, a colorful ground beetle, a large dragon fly, etc. But a small parasitoid wasp (2.5 mm long)... are you kidding me? Who cares about THAT?

Well, as they say "no harm in trying", and I am trying today to present the case for a first parasitoid wasp to be considered by COSEWIC: the microgastrine species Apanteles samarshalli Fernández-Triana, 2010.

The species was described very recently, in 2010, from specimens found mostly in southern Florida, United States (Everglades and the Florida Keys). I have also found additional specimens in two countries of Central America (data from unpublished studies). 

But, the original description also recorded the species from one Canadian locality: Rondeau Provincial Park, in southwestern Ontario. Rondeau truly honours its reputation of having species commonly found at much southern latitudes, because the single specimen collected there (in August of 1973, and deposited in the Canadian National Collection of Insects, Ottawa) happens to be, by far, the northernmost known for the species.

Open for business: Apanteles fumiferanae

The microgastrine wasp Apanteles fumiferanae Viereck is one the most important Braconidae -as forest pest management concerns- in North America. Based on specimens available in collections, it is the most common braconid parasitoid reared from the spruce budworm Choristoneura fumiferanae (Harris) (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae), which in turn is one of the major forest pests in the region.

Very few pests rival the spruce budworm in importance, and thus this lepidopteran species has been extensively studied over the years. There are hundreds of papers covering details of its biology, ecology, damage and control (biological, chemical, integrated). As part of those studies, for many years its caterpillars have been collected and reared for parasitoids, providing perhaps the best information ever available for a single forest pest in the Neartic. And still there are many details to be researched and understood!

Some recent papers summarize what we know until now. For example, an excellent analysis of the complex relationships between the spruce budworm and its parasitoids/hyperparasitoids/pathogens, was published by Eldon Eveleigh (Canadian Forest Service, CFS) and ten co-authors in 2007; it can be freely downloaded here. Reading that paper will open anyone eyes regarding the complexities of the food webs in a temperate forest. I especially recommend to check Figure 1 of that paper (which is not for the faint of heart!). One can only image similar analysis for a tropical forest... it is just mind boggling.

From a parasitoid perspective, John Huber, also from the CFS, led a team of four taxonomists to produce a series of papers covering all major groups of parasitoids of the genus Choristoneura in the Nearctic region: chalcid wasps (Huber, 1996), tachinid flies (O'Hara, 2005), ichneumonid wasps (Bennett, 2008) and braconid wasps (Fernández-Triana and Huber, 2010). Those works provided numerous illustrations, keys, and taxonomic notes to help identifying the large fauna of currently known parasitoids (230 species within 106 genera and 13 different families; see figures 155-157 and Discussion in Fernández-Triana and Huber (2010). [Unfortunately those papers can be downloaded for free, except for their Abstracts. However, being one of the authors of the braconid paper, I have plenty of reprints for that one, and would be pleased to send copies to anyone interested].

Which bring us back to the topic of this post: Apanteles fumiferanae. The species is widely distributed in the Nearctic region (there is also a record from Poland, but that might be incorrect). It has been reared from caterpillars of 17 lepidopteran species representing 4 families (although some of those early records, from historical references, are likely to be wrong). Close to one hundred scientific papers have dealt with that wasp species, and there is reason to believe more are needed... Why? Because A. fumiferanae actually comprises a complex of morphologically cryptic species (i.e. species that cannot be easily separate based on external morphology, yet are distinct biological entities).

Numbers matter

This week I was talking to my colleague Caroline Boudreault about the numbers of Braconidae specimens, species, and primary types that we currently have in Ottawa (Canadian National Collection of Insects, CNC). Caroline, an extremely skillful and knowledgeable person when it comes to braconids, had been asked to revise and update the number of primary types here.  

Primary types (i.e. holotypes, syntypes, lectotypes, and neotypes, as defined by Articles 73-75 of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature) are usually one of the main factors considered when evaluating the weight of a collection. The more the types, the higher a collection is ranked. Because primary types are name-bearing specimens. 

So, how good is the CNC in terms of Braconidae types? According to Taxapad, there are almost 300 institutions worldwide storing primary type material of braconid wasps, altogether representing 20,007 type specimens. And, according to that source, Ottawa is the 5th largest collection in the world, with 683 types (see pie chart below).

Number of primary types (mostly holotypes) stored in 272 collections of Braconidae worldwide (after Taxapad, 2012).

When Caroline added some new data that is not yet in Taxapad, the number rose to more than 720. And then we will be incorporating over 200 new holotypes within the next couple of months (I will write about that development in a future post). Thus, in round numbers, the CNC collection of Braconidae is approaching the one-thousand-types mark. 

Of course, beyond the number of primary types it is also important to know the number of specimens overall, the geographic coverage of the collection per se, and its curation state. We do not know those figures with the same precision as for the types, but below I share what have found out so far.

There are almost 60 cabinets, each with 29 drawers, for a total of over 1,600 drawers with braconid wasps in the CNC (a previous summary mentioned 1,500 drawers of Braconidae, but that number has increased steadily in the past two years). Based on that, and on a conservative average number of specimens/drawer,  my tentative estimate would be around half million of specimens. And that only represents the mounted/pined material; there is a huge collection in alcohol (several thousand vials, as mentioned here), where many more thousands specimens await to be processed and incorporated to the main (dry) collection.

An elusive genus from the Old World Tropics

While the main emphasis of this blog is on Nearctic braconid wasps attacking caterpillars, from time to time it is nice to expand the geographic coverage. Especially when new information about uncommon species is available to be shared. In this post I will be commenting on the genus Neoclarkinella, described from India in 1996 by Rema and Narendran.

Currently that genus of Microgastrinae comprises three species, two from India and one from China. Those species have been described within the last 20 years or so, and the information on them is extremely scarce, with just seven papers in the scientific literature referring to Neoclarkinella. 

However, the genus is actually quite diverse and spread in the Old World tropics, especially Southeast Asia. In the Canadian National Collection, Ottawa (CNC), I have mounted and studied many specimens (mostly from Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, China, etc.), representing at least two dozen undescribed species. Many CNC specimens have also been sampled for DNA (CO1 gene) and the resulting barcodes were made freely available recently (in a paper I mentioned in a recent post).

Undescribed species of Neoclarkinella from Thailand, deposited in the CNC (Ottawa), with collection code CNCH2006.

Canadian Microgastrinae described by L. A. Provancher. Part II

This is the second part of a work about Canadian species of Microgastrinae described by Provancher in the XIX century. In all cases, the photos shown are the first ever to be taken to those holotypes, and are now available for anyone interested and/or working with the group. More information on the Provancher species will be soon made available through this blog and other websites.

Microplitis quadridentatus (Provancher, 1886). The original name given to the species was Microgaster 4-dentatus. Its known distribution is mostly Northeastern United States and Ontario, although it has also been recorded from South Dakota -suggesting a likely wider distribution in North America. It has been reared from two species of the Noctuid genus Simyra.