Encounters between flowers and invertebrates are key events for the functioning of tropical forests. Assessing the structure of networks composed of the interactions between those partners leads to a better understanding of ecosystem functioning and the effects of environmental factors on ecological processes. Gathering such data is, however, costly and time-consuming, especially in the highly diverse tropics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRhinoleucophenga Hendel is an endemic genus of the New World with most species recorded in Brazil. Rhinoleucophenga obesa (Loew) seemed to be the most widespread species, being recorded in the United States of America, Mexico and Brazil. In the Neotropical region, identifications of R.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe genus Rhinoleucophenga Hendel comprises 26 nominal species with New World distribution. In the present study, two new species are described from samples in the Pampa and Caatinga biomes in Brazil, R. punctuloides sp.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the last three decades some faunal surveys of Drosophilidae have been done in several environments in the Neotropical region, especially in Brazil. But approximately 30 to 50% of the drosophilids in Brazil have not yet been described, and the degradation of some biomes causes a profound loss of species diversity, as well as the loss of information about the present structureof their communities. This is the situation with the pampas biome, which covers southernmost Brazil, all of Uruguay, and the central region of eastern Argentina.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInfections by the endosymbiotic bacterium Wolbachia developed a rapid global expansion within Old World Drosophila species, ultimately infecting also Neotropical species. In this sense, screenings are necessary to characterize new variants of Wolbachia or new hosts, and also in order to map the dynamics of already known infections. In this paper, we performed a double screening approach that combined Dot-blot and PCR techniques in order to reevaluate the infection status by Wolbachia in species from the willistoni subgroup of Drosophila.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe genus Rhinoleucophenga Hendel comprises 18 nominal species and has a Neotropical and Nearctic distribution. A new species was found in a collection in Florianópolis, SC, Brazil, and is described as Rhinoleucophenga joaquina sp. nov.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAssemblages of drosophilids have been characterised in several environments of the Brazilian territory, like the Atlantic Rain Forest, urban areas, cerrados, the Amazon Forest, and others. The present survey is the first attempt to characterise the fauna of Drosophilidae in mangrove forests, an environment typical of tropical coasts worldwide. Twenty-eight samples were collected from the three main mangrove forests of Santa Catarina Island, southern Brazil, using banana-baited traps hung in trees.
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