A new Colombian species of Liodessus diving beetles from the Páramo de Sumapaz (Coleoptera, Dytiscidae, Bidessini).

Michael Balke,Yoandri Suarez-Megna,Lars Hendrich,Juan Simon Venegas,Carlos Prieto,Rodulfo Ospina-Torres

doi:10.3897/zookeys.1059.70134

Abstract

Liodessuspicinussp. nov. is described from the Páramo de Sumapaz near Bogota D.C. at 3,500 m above sea level. The species can be distinguished from the other Colombian Liodessus species by its dark coloration, discontinuous habitus, shiny surface of the pronotum and elytron, presence of a distinct occipital line, distinct basal pronotal striae, short or even faint basal elytral striae, as well as by its distinct geographic distribution and cox1 signature.

Highlights

Diving beetles of the genus Liodessus Guignot, 1939 belong to the tribe Bidessini and occur in the New World as well as the Afrotropical Region (Biström 1988; Nilsson and Hájek 2021)
Since 2019, as the result of a research and training cooperation between our institutions, 10 new species were described from these regions of Peru (Balke et al 2019, 2020b) and Colombia (Megna et al 2019; Balke et al 2021)
It became apparent that many more new species of Liodessus remain to be discovered in the vast Andean highland ecosystems, most of them likely end emic to one or a few Páramo or Puna areas, respectively

Summary

Introduction

Diving beetles of the genus Liodessus Guignot, 1939 belong to the tribe Bidessini and occur in the New World as well as the Afrotropical Region (Biström 1988; Nilsson and Hájek 2021). Since 2019, as the result of a research and training cooperation between our institutions, 10 new species were described from these regions of Peru (Balke et al 2019, 2020b) and Colombia (Megna et al 2019; Balke et al 2021). To address this in a combined evidence pipeline, we suggested a DNA sequence-based platform for the study of these insects (Balke et al 2020a, 2020b) using the Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD) of the Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding and the 5′ mitochondrial cox1 gene fragment We report the discovery of another new species of Liodessus from Páramo de Sumapaz (Fig. 3A), the world’s largest Páramo system, near Bogota, Colombia.

Results

Conclusion