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Corresponding author: Sopio Balkhamishvili ( sopio.balkhamishvili.1@iliauni.edu.ge ) Academic editor: Ximo Mengual
© 2023 Sopio Balkhamishvili.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Balkhamishvili S (2023) The first record of the family Piophilidae (Insecta: Diptera) from the Caucasus. Caucasiana 2: 103-107. https://doi.org/10.3897/caucasiana.2.e104014
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Abstract
Piophilidae Macquart, 1835, is a small family of flies widely distributed in all parts of the world but more represented in the cooler temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. At present, there is a lack of information on the distribution of this family in the Caucasus region. In this study, the family Piophilidae, with a record of Prochyliza nigrimana (Meigen, 1826), is reported for the first time from the South Caucasus ecoregion.
CaBOL, DNA barcoding, Georgia, new record, Prochyliza nigrimana, South Caucasus
Piophilidae (Insecta: Diptera) is a small family of small, rather stout, dark flies (
As one of our planet’s biodiversity hotspots, there is a significant knowledge gap in the Caucasus biodiversity (
To our knowledge, the Piophilidae have not been recorded in the Caucasus so far (
The material examined was collected using a sweepnet in a meadow next to Sakisto Lake (Tbatana Lake, Georgia) (Fig.
Morphological determination was carried out using the identification key of
Digital photographs of the collected specimen CaBOL-ID 1028210 (Fig.
Figure
DNA was extracted from the whole specimen using the Quick-DNA Magbead Plus Kit (Zymo Research). Partial sequences of cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) were amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) using the primer pairs LCOI490-JJ and HCO2198-JJ (
Georgia • 1 ♂; Tbatana; N42.287017°, E45.242762°; 2059 m a.s.l.; 29 May 2022; leg. CaBOL members (IZ ISU); meadow next to the lake; CaBOL-ID 1028210 (Fig.
The newly obtained COI sequence for the specimen CaBOL-ID 1028210 (BOLD:ADL1379) is 658 bp long and is nearly identical to the 5'-end COI sequence of P. nigrimana from Spain in GenBank (Accession: OM791734, p-distance = 0.5%). There are 7 sequences available for this species in the BOLD Systems database - all 483 bp long except for one that has a length of 349 bp. A comparison of the obtained sequence with those in BOLD systems failed to determine the species, probably due to the significant length differences.
In this study, the first record of the family Piophilidae and P. nigrimana from Georgia (and the South Caucasus ecoregion) is provided.
According to
Described from Germany (
The author expresses her gratitude to Daniel Martin-Vega for his valuable comments and corrections on the first draft of the manuscript and validation of the species, Ximo Mengual provided valuable suggestions during the manuscript review. The CaBOL team for their help in the fieldwork, to Armen Seropian (Institute of Ecology, Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia) for kindly improving the language and structure of the article and for providing the photo of the specimen, to Shota Japarashvili for generating the map, and to Giorgi Iankoshvili for providing habitat photographs.
The CaBOL project, on which this report/study is based, was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under grant number 01DK20014A.