Corresponding author: Nicholas C Goltz (
Academic editor: Matthew Yoder
The adventive arrival of biological control agents circumvents the regulatory process by introducing exotic species to control invasive pests and is generally followed by post hoc risk evaluation. The bean plataspid,
The term “fortuitous biological control” was coined by
This phenomenon has received renewed attention in recent years, due in part to the high-profile case of the samurai wasp,
Pentatomoid eggs, like the scale insects studied by
We recently discovered wild
On June 19, 2018, a collection trip was undertaken to replenish the colony of
Of these
Thirty
Adult
Specimens were point-mounted and deposited in the Florida State Collection of Arthropods (FDACS-DPI, E2018-4411-1). Two specimens (one male and one female) were cleared in potassium hydroxide and slide-mounted in Canada balsam, according to a protocol modified from
Six
The 5’-COI barcode region was PCR-amplified using the primers LEP-F1 and LEP-R1 (
To evaluate our new sequences in the context of the subfamily, all 5’-COI barcodes for
Sequences were aligned using ClustalW with default settings (
The mPTP species delimitation programme requires a rooted, binary Newick tree for input (
Delimitations computed in the mPTP programme used the minimum branch length threshold calculated with the “--minbr_auto” option. Heuristic maximum likelihood species delimitations were performed with a single coalescent rate averaged over all species. The confidence of the delimitations was assessed using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling method. MCMC parameters included two independent runs with each run starting with the most likely delimitation, 100,000,000 MCMC iterations, and sampling of log-likelihoods every 10,000 MCMC iterations. The convergence of independent runs was evaluated by examining the sampled log-likelihood plots. The two runs converged within the first 1% of MCMC iterations.
Species delimitations were also produced using the server version of Automatic Barcode Gap Discovery (ABGD) (
The three previously frozen
Laboratory reared specimens were compared to descriptions in
There is some disagreement between
Neighbour-joining analysis excluded all positions with ambiguous data, leaving a total of 487 positions for inclusion (out of 562 possible positions) and recovered an
W-IQ-TREE analyses found the most likely tree with a log likelihood score of -12138.342. ML bootstrap support for the recovered
In ABGD, all tested minimum relative gap widths returned initial delimitations of 68 species from the
Our testing indicates that the Florida
Implications for Florida agriculture merit further investigation.
Future research may investigate the performance of
Competition between egg parasitoid species has the potential to impact populations of introduced and native biological control agents. For example, egg parasitoids, such as
At the time of writing, fifteen generations of
Despite possible beneficial applications this insect may have, however, the fact remains that it is not indigenous to the United States. Additional research is necessary to determine if
We thank the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services – Division of Plant Industry for their support on this contribution. We are very grateful to Amy Howe, Eric Rohrig, Cheryl Roberts and George Schneider (FDACS-DPI) for their advice and scientific support. This work would not have been possible without Kylie Lennon (University of Florida), who imaged the wasp mandibles; Andy Boring and Sedonia Steininger (FDACS-DPI), who reviewed our manuscript and provided constructive comments; and librarian Jeff Eby (FDACS-DPI), who was instrumental in finding Japanese literature.
Kimura 2-parameter neighbour-joining tree showing the clustering of similar sequences in the
Transformed
COI GenBank Accessions and BOLD sequence IDs utilised in this study.
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Rates of parasitism and emergence in the second generation
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94 | 59 | 52 | 62.8% | 0.62 |
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78 | 55 | 54 | 70.5% | 0.61 |
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78 | 50 | 37 | 64.1% | 0.43 |
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69 | 54 | 52 | 78.3% | 0.64 |
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41 | 26 | 22 | 63.4% | 0.64 |
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34 | 14 | 13 | 41.2% | 0.69 |
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66 | 43 | 42 | 65.2% | 0.69 |
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61 | 44 | 42 | 72.1% | 0.67 |
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521 | 345 | 314 | 66.2% | 0.62 |
COI Barcode Dataset
Genomic
File: oo_303610.fas
K2P Distance Groupings
K2P distance groupings
File: oo_303828.txt