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| in Mitchell, Moeseneder & Hutchinson, 2020 photo: Christian H. Moeseneder |
Abstract
DNA barcode data is presented for Australian cetoniine flower beetles to aid with species discovery and guide revisionary taxonomy. Sequences of the COI gene’s DNA barcode region were acquired from 284 cetoniine specimens, covering 68 described species and 33 genera. This equates to 48% of the known species and 83% of the genera which occur in Australia. Results suggest up to 27 putative undescribed species in our sample, only 11 of which were suspected to be undescribed before this study, leaving 16 unexpected (“cryptic”) species. The Australian cetoniine fauna may hence be increased by up to 19%. An unanticipated result of the work is that each of the five most visible and commonly collected Australian cetoniine species, Eupoecila australasiae (Donovan, 1805), Neorrhina punctatum (Donovan, 1805), Glycyphana (Glycyphaniola) stolata (Fabricius, 1781), Chondropyga dorsalis (Donovan, 1805) and Bisallardiana gymnopleura (Fischer, 1823), have unexpectedly high diversity in DNA barcode sequences and were consequently split into multiple clusters, possibly indicating the presence of cryptic species.
Conclusions:
We produced a DNA barcode dataset for Australian flower beetles that includes approximately half of the country’s species. We found that DNA barcodes provide species-level resolution in almost all cases. The high levels of DNA diversity were unexpected within many species, and preliminary morphological investigations suggest that there may be as many as 27 undescribed species in our dataset. Further integrative taxonomic work, incorporating COI-based DNA barcoding, nuclear gene data and detailed morphological investigations, are needed to better understand the diversity of Australian Cetoniinae and to document and describe numerous undescribed species.
Andrew Mitchell, Christian H. Moeseneder and Paul M. Hutchinson. 2020. Hiding in Plain Sight: DNA Barcoding suggests Cryptic Species in All ‘well-known’ Australian Flower Beetles (Scarabaeidae: Cetoniinae). PeerJ. 8:e9348. DOI: 10.7717/peerj.9348
