Abstract
The Neotropical evaniid genus Evaniscus Szépligeti currently includes six species. Two new species are described, Evaniscus lansdownei Mullins, sp. n. from Colombia and Brazil and Evaniscus rafaeli Kawada, sp. n. from Brazil. Evaniscus sulcigenis Roman, syn. n., is synonymized under Evaniscus rufithorax Enderlein. An identification key to species of Evaniscus is provided. Thirty-five parsimony informative morphological characters are analyzed for six ingroup and four outgroup taxa. A topology resulting in a monophyletic Evaniscus is presented with Evaniscus tibialis and Evaniscus rafaeli as sister to the remaining Evaniscus species. The Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology and other relevant biomedical ontologies are employed to create semantic phenotype statements in Entity-Quality (EQ) format for species descriptions. This approach is an early effort to formalize species descriptions and to make descriptive data available to other domains.
Highlights
Deans et al (2012) recently opined that phenotype data collected by taxonomists, i.e., the natural language character statements found in diagnoses and descriptions, could, if presented in a broadly accessible, searchable manner, be used to address big questions in biology
Taxonomists stand to contribute an immense body of knowledge that could be used to address a broad array of questions in many realms of biology (Deans et al 2012)
How might phenotypes be correlated to climate change? Or how might changes in phenotype correspond with the environment? Presently, queries of characters that reference a specific part of the anatomy are already possible (Deans et al 2012)
Summary
We offer a real example of natural language descriptions that are annotated with semantic phenotype statements, modeled after the EQ representation referred to by Deans et al (2012) (see Mikó and Deans 2009; Mungall et al 2010; Mabee et al 2007; Patterson et al 2010; Balhoff et al in prep), expressed in Web Ontology Language (OWL) and ready for the Semantic Web. A formal model has been developed (Balhoff et al 2011), and its advantages and limitations are discussed by Balhoff et al (in prep). Our taxonomic subject is the ensign wasp genus, Evaniscus (Hymenoptera: Evaniidae). There is a paucity of prey records for Evaniidae in general, and none is known for Evaniscus (Deans 2005)
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