Abstract
During the last few years, DNA barcoding has become an efficient method for the identification of species. In the case of insects, most published DNA barcoding studies focus on species of the Ephemeroptera, Trichoptera, Hymenoptera and especially Lepidoptera. In this study we test the efficiency of DNA barcoding for true bugs (Hemiptera: Heteroptera), an ecological and economical highly important as well as morphologically diverse insect taxon. As part of our study we analyzed DNA barcodes for 1742 specimens of 457 species, comprising 39 families of the Heteroptera. We found low nucleotide distances with a minimum pairwise K2P distance <2.2% within 21 species pairs (39 species). For ten of these species pairs (18 species), minimum pairwise distances were zero. In contrast to this, deep intraspecific sequence divergences with maximum pairwise distances >2.2% were detected for 16 traditionally recognized and valid species. With a successful identification rate of 91.5% (418 species) our study emphasizes the use of DNA barcodes for the identification of true bugs and represents an important step in building-up a comprehensive barcode library for true bugs in Germany and Central Europe as well. Our study also highlights the urgent necessity of taxonomic revisions for various taxa of the Heteroptera, with a special focus on various species of the Miridae. In this context we found evidence for on-going hybridization events within various taxonomically challenging genera (e.g. Nabis Latreille, 1802 (Nabidae), Lygus Hahn, 1833 (Miridae), Phytocoris Fallén, 1814 (Miridae)) as well as the putative existence of cryptic species (e.g. Aneurus avenius (Duffour, 1833) (Aradidae) or Orius niger (Wolff, 1811) (Anthocoridae)).
Highlights
True bugs or Heteroptera are a highly diverse taxon of the Hemiptera which count as one of the big five insect orders in terms of species richness [1]
Taxonomic classifications, images, DNA barcodes, used primer pairs and trace files are publicly accessible in the project GEBUG in the Barcode of Life Datasystems (BOLD; www.boldsystems.org) [87,88], which represents a fused project of a part of the Fauna Bavaria campaign [89] and EUBUG
Our sequence library represents an important step of analyzing the utility of DNA barcodes to discriminate true bug species, in particular for Central Europe
Summary
True bugs or Heteroptera are a highly diverse taxon of the Hemiptera which count as one of the big five insect orders in terms of species richness [1]. True bugs evolved an astonishing diversity of morphological structures, and their ecological diversity is formidable. They colonized almost all ecosystems worldwide except the deep sea and Polar region. Mutualistic interactions with ants [13] occur in some species and as subsocial behavior parental care by females is a widely known phenomenon which independently developed in several Heteroptera families [14], and male caring has been described (e.g. the giant water bugs of the family Belastomatidae [15]). Mating strategies are very diverse in Heteroptera, incl. traumatic insemination in bedbugs and anthocorids
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