Hintonelmis Spangler, 1966

Fikáček, Martin, Skuhrovec, Jiří & Šípek, Petr, 2013, Abstracts of the Immature Beetles Meeting 2013, Acta Entomologica Musei Nationalis Pragae 53 (2), pp. 891-910 : 896-897

Discovery of Hintonelmis Spangler ( Coleoptera : Elmidae ) larvae and preliminary phylogenetic relationships based on COI mDNA sequences

André S. FERNANDES¹), Fedor ČIAMPOR Jr.²), Neusa HAMADA³) & Ignacio RIBERA¹)

1) Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (CSIC-UPF), CEP: 37-49, 08003, Barcelona, Spain; e-mails: [e-mail], [e-mail]

2) Institute of Zoology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská cesta 9, SK-84506, Bratislava, Slovakia; e-mail: [e-mail]

3) Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Divisão de Curso em Entomologia, Coordenação de Pesquisas em Entomologia, Caixa Postal 478, CEP: 69011-970 Manaus, AM, Brazil; e-mail: [e-mail]

For many decades, studies on the association among adults and larvae of Elmidae were restricted to rearing trials or even merely by selection of individuals with proportional size and overlapping occurrences. However, despite its importance for the knowledge of the species biology, rearing techniques are not feasible for all Elmidae species. Many elmids may take several months to become imago and most of them require special environmental conditions to complete their development (BROWN 1987, ELLIOT 2008, JÄCH & BALKE 2008). In the last decade, molecular techniques like RFLP and DNA sequencing became more accessible for zoological studies, being used for several purposes.

In this work we describe the larvae of Hintonelmis delevei Hinton. The conspecificity among the adults and larvae was confirmed based on the mitochondrial gene region cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI). We also present a first draft on the genus phylogeny based on five more Hintonelmis species , H. atys Hinton , H. carus Hinton , H. opis Hinton , H. perfecta (Grouvelle) and H. sp. and three larval morphotypes. We used Bayesian and Maximum likelihood phylogenetic analyses using MrBayes and MEGA software respectively. Multiple alignement was done using MAFT software and then sequences (about 820bp) were checked manually.

Both methods were congruent for all clades. Despite molecular analysis made clear that larval morphotypes belong to different species, a careful morphological study (including SEM visualizations) did not show any remarkable difference among them (apart slight difference in size and color pattern). As expected, H. perfecta and H. carus showed to be the closest known Elmidae species analyzed. Sepatation between H. opis and H. sp. is not corroborated and, despite their remarkable differences in color pattern, they seem to be extremely close or even belonging to the same species. Hintonelmis atys and H. delevei are well defined and supported by high values of bootstrap (99 %), positioned externally to the remaining species as following ((( H. delevei + ( H. atys + (remaing Hintonelmis ))).

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JÄCH M. A. & BALKE M. 2008: Global Diversity of Water Beetles ( Coleoptera ) infreshwater. Hydrobiologia 595: 419–442.