Steffan Hansen‡, Pia Addison§, Laure Benoit|, Julien M Haran|Corresponding author: Steffan Hansen ( shansen.rsa@gmail.com ) © Steffan Hansen, Pia Addison, Laure Benoit, Julien Haran. This is an open access preprint 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:
Hansen S, Addison P, Benoit L, Haran JM (2021) Barcoding pest species in a biodiversity hot-spot: the South African polyphagous broad-nosed weevils (Coleoptera, Curculionidae, Entiminae). ARPHA Preprints. https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e66612 |  |
Polyphagous broad nosed weevils (Curculionidae: Entiminae) constitute a large and taxonomically challenging subfamily that contains economically significant agricultural pests worldwide. South Africa is a hot-spot for biodiversity and several species of indigenous and endemic genera of Entiminae have shifted onto cultivated plants, with some being phytosanitary pests. The sporadic nature of many species, and the presence of pest complexes and cryptic species presents an identification challenge to non-specialists. Furthermore no comprehensive identification tools to identify immature stages that may be found in crops/soil exist. In this paper a curated barcoding database with 70 COI sequences from 41 species (39 Entiminae, 2 Cyclominae) is initiated, to assist with the complexity of identification of species in this group.