La importancia de las colecciones biológicas para la salud pública: El caso de la colección de Triatominae del Museo del Instituto de Zoología Agrícola “Francisco Fernández Yépez”, Venezuela

Abstract

Entomological collections help scientists to rapidly identify invasive insects that affect agriculture, forestry, and human and animal health and to infer about global change biology. There are several collections with deposited Chagas disease vectors that are distributed throughout the world, but most of them present in Brazil. Faced with the need to disclose the biological material deposited in these collections, Brazilian articles were published compiling the information about the Triatomines Collections of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, the Collection of Chagas Disease Vectors, the Entomologic collections of the Faculty of Public Health of the University of Sao Paulo, and the Entomological Collection of Instituto Butantan. The Museum of the Institute of Agricultural Zoology “Francisco Fernández Yépez” (MIZA) in Venezuela has more than four million arthropods deposited in its collection, being more than 4,500 holotypes. Based on the importance of disseminating to the world the richness of species deposited in biological collections, with emphasis on the entomological collections of vectors that can present important epidemiological information on the distribution of the vector-borne diseases, the present work compiles all the information related to triatomines deposited in MIZA. Through the analysis of the triatomines deposited in the MIZA was possible to highlight that there are over one thousand triatomines deposited in the entomological collection, distributed in 39 species grouped in four tribes: Bolboderini (two species), Cavernicolini (one species), Rhodniini (seven species) and Triatomini (29 species). In additional, eleven new occurrence points were described for Venezuelan states, namely, Miranda (Cavernicola pilosa and Eratyrus mucronatus), Amazonas (Rhodnius pictipes and E. mucronatus), Aragua (R. robustus), Federal District (E. mucronatus), Barinas (Panstrongylus geniculatus), Bolívar (P. rufotuberculatus), Carabobo (Triatoma nigromaculata), Falcón (T. nigromaculata) and Táchira (T. nigromaculata). The analysis of the entomological collection of MIZA allowed to group important information on the richness of biological material deposited for the subfamily Triatominae, as well as for the epidemiology of Chagas disease in the States of Venezuela, emphasizing the importance of the dissemination of information on biological collections to the scientific community in the form of manuscripts or official sites aiming the internationalization and valuation of collections and deposited material.