Taxonomia de Macronema Pictet (Insecta: Trichoptera: Hydropsychidae) e associação de larvas e adultos por meio do metamorfótipo e sequências de DNA do gene COI

Abstract

Although the family Hydropsychidae and the genus Macronema have a high tolerance to environmental changes, its use in freshwater biomonitoring programs has been greatly hampered by the lack of identified and illustrated larvae. Conventional tools to associate larvae with adults have generally been slow and problematic, so a faster and safer technique is proposed, integrating morphology with molecular analysis. Integrative taxonomy is defined by the integration of different types of analyzes, for example using morphological and molecular characters available to delimit species. Adults and larvae were collected in two municipalities, Manaus and Presidente Figueiredo/AM, which were identified using the adult male genitalia and the staining pattern of the forewings, and the larvae classified in morphotypes before the molecular analysis. DNA was extracted from the morphotyped specimens and a fragment of the mitochondrial DNA gene cytochrome oxidase subunit 1 (COI) was amplified for 43 specimens, which were sequenced. The sequence from an outgroup (from the same mitochondrial region) was obtained from GenBank. Phylogenetic analyses were carried out using the methods of Maximum Parsimony (MP), Neighbor-Joining (NJ) and Maximum Likelihood using the Kimura-2-parameters (K2P) model. As a result, eight species of larvae were associated successfully, six females were also associated with the males through the staining pattern and DNA analysis. Two new species to science and four larvae not associated before were described in this study facilitating further the association studies. This study may also be useful to associate male and female, to assist in species identification and reveal cryptic species not just within the genus Macronema, but also encompassing other taxonomic levels.