Insect gall occurrence in savanna and forest remnant sites of Hidrolândia, GO, Brazil Central

Elienai Cândida E Silva,Walter Santos De Araújo,Benedito Baptista Dos Santos

doi:10.11606/1807-0205/2018.58.04

Elienai Cândida E Silva, Walter Santos De Araújo + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.11606/1807-0205/2018.58.04

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Abstract

In this study we perform an inventory of the insect galls in savanna and forest sites of Hidrolândia, Goiás, Brazil. We found 150 insect gall morphotypes, distributed on 39 botanical families and 104 plant species. Among the insect galls, 81 gall morphotypes were recorded in the savanna site and 73 in the forest site. The plant taxa richest in insect galls were the family Fabaceae with 22 gall morphotypes, the genus Bauhinia (Fabaceae) with 15, and the species Siparuna guianensis (Siparunaceae) with seven gall morphotypes. We found gall-inducing insects belonging to orders Diptera, Coleoptera, Lepidoptera and Thysanoptera. The galling insects of family Cecidomyiidae (Diptera) were the most common inducing 48.1% of the gall morphotypes. This is the first systematic survey of insect galls realized in the city of Hidrolândia, being this the site with the higher insect gall diversity already cataloged to the Central region of Brazil.

Highlights

Galls are abnormal modifications in the vegetal tissues induced mainly by galling insects, and characterized by hypertrophy and hyperplasia of plant cells (Mani, 1964; Shorthouse & Rohfritsch, 1992)
This is the first systematic survey of insect galls realized in the city of Hidrolândia, being this the site with the higher insect gall diversity already cataloged to the Central region of Brazil
We found 150 insect gall morphotypes distributed on 39 botanical families and 104 plant species in the Escola Agrícola (EA)‐Centro de Formação Agroecológico de Hidrolândia (CEFAEH) (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

Galls are abnormal modifications in the vegetal tissues induced mainly by galling insects, and characterized by hypertrophy and hyperplasia of plant cells (Mani, 1964; Shorthouse & Rohfritsch, 1992). The Brazilian Cerrado is composed by a wide variety of vegetation types (Ribeiro & Walter, 2008), and one of the richest floras of Brazil and in the world (Klink & Machado, 2005; Mendonça et al, 2008). This great structural and floristic diversity is one of the main explanations for the high insect gall diversity in the Cerrado (Araújo et al, 2014a). The number of insect gall studies in the Cerrado has been growing in the recent years (Araújo et al, 2014a), evidence points that there are still temporal and spatial gaps in the group sampling (e.g., Araújo, 2011; Maia et al, 2014)

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