Full length articleFirst record of the genus Aprostocetus (Hymenoptera: Eulophidae) from Korea with the description of a new species: An inquiline of Rhopalomyia giraldii (Diptera: Cecidomyiidae) inducing galls on Artemisia princeps (Asterales: Asteraceae)
Introduction
Genus Aprostocetus Westwood, 1833 is one of the most diverse genera within the Tetrastichinae with 813 species worldwide (Noyes, 2019). There are 111 species of genus Aprostocetus recorded in Primorsky Krai of Russia which is bordered to the Korean Peninsula (Noyes 2019). Until present in Korea, only two Tetrastichinae species among the 99 species of Eulophidae have been recorded: Tetrastichus ibseni (Girault, 1916) and Melittobia acasta (Walker, 1839) (Kim, 2019).
Tetrastichinae is associated with galls as a parasitoid of other insects in the gall, both inquilines and/or gall inducers (La Salle, 2005). Most of the species of genus Aprostocetus are known to be parasitoids of insects, with some particular cases occurring in Delphacidae (Hemiptera) (Rothschild, 1966) and Orthoptera (Graham, 1987). One of the characteristics of this group is that they can parasitize gall inducing insects, mainly from Cynipoidea, Cecidomyiidae, Coleoptera (Graham, 1987) and even gall-producing Eulophidae (Yang et al., 2014). On the other hand, some species are phytophagous (Li et al., 2014) and can be gall inducers themselves (Nieves-Aldrey and Askew, 2011, Viggiani and Monaco, 2014) or inquilines living in the galls of other insects feeding on the plant tissues (Sheng and Zhao, 1995).
In many cases, the biological data of the species is either very poor or totally inexistent. This problem derives directly from the sampling methods from which the species collected, as when collected through sweeping or traps (malaise, color-pan traps…), their biology remains unknown, therefore it would be recommended to rear the potential hosts in controlled conditions to know whether the species are parasitoids, phytophagous or inquiline.
We have reared galls of Rhopalomyia giraldii (Kieffer and Trotter, 1900) (Cecidomyiidae) which induces galls look-like cotton balls on plant Artemisia princeps (Asteraceae). Wasps emerged from galls with gall-midges and we dissected the galls to know whether the wasps are parasitoid of the midges or not. As a result, the wasps were revealed to be inquilines of the gall-midges and not parasitoids.
In this study, we report the genus Aprostocetus for the first time in Korea with the description of a new species. Besides, we give biological information about this species.
Section snippets
Materials & methods
We collected 45 galls from Boryeong (July), Daejeon (July), Gimje (April and July), and Jeju (November) in South Korea. The galls were kept in plastic containers (7 × 7 × 10 cm) covered with mesh to prevent rotting due to high humidity levels, posteriorly the dried galls were kept in zip bags (rearing container) under laboratory conditions; 10 galls which are similar in size and collected from Gimje on 11.IV.2019 were placed together in the same rearing container, and others from Boryeong,
Aprostocetus cumgallae Bae & Jung sp. nov.
(Fig. 1A–E).
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank I.K. Kim (National DMZ Native Botanical Garden, Korea) and Christer Hansson (Lund University, Sweden) who provided us with useful comments and technics. To Gary Gibson who gave us helpful comments. To W.G. Kim (Korea University, Korea) who confirmed the identification of the midge. Finally, to the two anonymous reviewers who gave us useful comments that improved the final version of the manuscript. The first author would like to thank his lab colleagues, especially to M.
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