Abstract
Species of the genus Colocasiomyia de Meijere feed/breed on inflorescences/infructescences of the plants from the families Araceae, Arecaceae and Magnoliaceae. Although most of them utilize plants from the subfamily Aroideae of Araceae, three species of the recently established C. gigantea species group make use of plants of the subfamily Monsteroideae. We describe four new species of the gigantea group found from Yunnan, China: Colocasiomyia longifilamentata Li & Gao, sp. n., C. longivalva Li & Gao, sp. n., C. hailini Li & Gao, sp. n., and C. yini Li & Gao, sp. n. The species delimitation is proved in virtue of not only morphology but also DNA barcodes, i.e., sequences of the partial mitochondrial COI (cytochrome c oxidase subunit I) gene. Some nucleotide sites with fixed status in the alignment of the COI sequences (658 sites in length) are used as “pure” molecular diagnostic characters to delineate species in the gigantea group.
Highlights
To date, as many as 90 species have been found in the genus Colocasiomyia de Meijere, 1914
We found four new species of this group visiting inflorescences of Rhaphidophora decursiva (Roxb.) Schott (Table 1); at least three of them were found breeding on inflorescences/infructescences of this plant
The largest intraspecific Kimura 2-parameter (K2P) distance in the gigantea group was found in C. scindapsae (= 0.0102), while the smallest interspecific one was found between C. rhaphidophorae and C. longifilamentata (= 0.0135)
Summary
As many as 90 species (of them only 25 species described) have been found in the genus Colocasiomyia de Meijere, 1914. The gigantea group was recently erected by Fartyal et al (2013) for two species [C. gigantea (Okada, 1987) and C. scindapsae Fartyal & Toda, 2013] from Southeast Asia and one species (C. rhaphidophorae Gao & Toda, 2013) from China (Table 1) Host plants of these species belong to the Rhaphidophora clade of the subfamily Monsteroideae of True Araceae, according to the most recent phylogenetic studies of the Araceae (Cusimano et al 2011, Nauheimer et al 2012). Fartyal et al (2013) conducted a cladistic analysis of 70 morphological characters of 34 Colocasiomyia species, covering all the six species groups of the genus Their results lent essential support to the monophyly of the gigantea group, placing it as the sister clade to the cristata species group
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