Hypera Germar, 1817

Christoph Germann, Sofia Wyler & Marco Valerio Bernasconi, 2017, DNA barcoding of selected alpine beetles with focus on Curculionoidea (Coleoptera), Revue suisse de Zoologie 124 (1), pp. 15-38 : 23

Genus Hypera Germar, 1817

Even at the species-level, we found no support for a monophyly of all the Hypera species investigated here based on our COI data ( Fig. 1 , Supp. 1). In particular, the recorded genetic distances ( Table 3) were relatively low (from 0.003 to 0.012) for any of the three species of the H. nigrirostris group [nigrirostris (Fabricius, 1775), ononidis (Chevrolat, 1863) and melarynchus (Olivier, 1807)]. The morphologically weakly supported hypothesis of the species status for Hypera ononidis was already questioned by Stüben et al. (2015) in their barcode approach. Although, obvious ecological differences are evident (H. ononidis lives on Ononis spp. and occurs in a sub-area of H. nigrirostris, which accepts a wider range of Fabaceae ). Therefore, a more recent speciation process (not yet detectable with the possibly too conservative COI-marker), and thus the evolution of eco-species at an early stage of differentiation might be an explanation for this circumstance. Interestingly also the morphologically close H. melarynchus – living on the Fabaceae Ononis ramosissima – clustered together with H. ononidis + nigrirostris. However, H. melarynchus shows several morphological characters (biggest species of all three> 5 mm; rostrum long and slender, at least as long as pronotum; 7th article about as wide as club; elongate elytra parallel along middle; penis S-shaped in lateral view, tip elongate, tongue-like) that allow an unambiguous separation from H. nigrirostris and H. ononidis, and therefore the species status has never been questioned. This provides further evidence that the nigrirostris -species group might indeed represent a younger group where speciation is at an early stage with an incomplete lineage sorting and highlighting therefore the limited resolution power of the used barcoding marker (see Germann et al., 2010 for a similar case in Diptera ).

Figures

Fig. 1. Best Maximum Likelihood tree as selected by MEGA) based on COI sequences of 142 samples of Curculionoidea (Chrysomelidae obtained by using MEGA 6. Values (over 50 %) of bootstrap support from 100 nodes.