Drosophila sulfurigaster (Duda, 1923:48)

Mcevey, Shane F. & Polak, Michal, 2021, Drosophilidae (Diptera) of the Cook Islands, Records of the Australian Museum (Rec. Aust. Mus.) 73 (5), pp. 153-170 : 160

Drosophila sulfurigaster (Duda, 1923:48)

Drosophila sulfurigaster is a very common species in tropical parts of Australia and New Guinea (Madang is the type locality), numerous strains have been collected and studied from many Pacific islands above and below the equator (Wilson et al., 1969; Spieth, 1969; Kitagawa et al., 1982). The chromosomes vary in form throughout its range and this has led to the naming of certain insular populations as subspecies (D. s. albostrigata Wheeler, 1969 and D. s. bilimbata Wheeler, 1969). Since we cannot examine the Cook Island specimens cytologically or karyologically (quarantine control now largely precludes transportation of live Drosophila cultures from the wild into Australia, New Zealand, France or the US), since no lab strains can be established, we have no relevant data and are ignoring the subspecific classification. 948 (12% of total) specimens of D. sulfurigaster were collected at 14 of the 16 sites surveyed ( Table 3); all are preserved in the AM.

Malloch (1933: 21) considered Drosophila nasuta Lamb, 1914 to be a species “probably distributed over most of the Pacific islands” but later Wilson et al. (1969) were able to confirm that the widespread species in the TSP was D. sulfurigaster and that D. nasuta was restricted to the Afrotropical Region. The Cook Islands Biodiversity database ( McCormack, 2015) lists D. nasuta instead of D. sulfurigaster .