Carabidae and Tenebrionidae diversity in the Great Basin Province of California.

The high desert regions of eastern California within the Great Basin are vast areas of shrub-dominated habitat heavily impacted by invasive exotic grasses and forbs. Trapping efforts within these areas provided distributional information about various surface-active arthropod taxa. Two groups with high species diversity and abundance encountered at our sites were the coleopteran families Carabidae and Tenebrionidae. Here, we report trapping of 45 species of carabids and 46 species of tenebrionids, along with mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (COI) sequence data for 65 of these 92 species. These results build upon existing distributional information regarding these families in California and further refine our knowledge of the biodiversity of the understudied Great Basin provinces.

Taxonomic Description of Stenodiplosis tectori n. sp. (Diptera: Cecidomyiidae), a Seed Parasite of Cheatgrass, Anisantha tectorum, Based on Morphological and Mitochondrial DNA Data.

Cheatgrass is an annual grass species from Eurasia that has become invasive in much of western North America. It has been implicated in recent increases in the frequency, size, and intensity of wildfires, contributing to severe economic, environmental, and social destruction. In order to reduce this damage, the USDA-ARS established a classical biological control program against cheatgrass. In 2018 and 2019, adult gall midges were collected emerging from cheatgrass seed heads collected at several sites in Bulgaria and Greece; this is the first gall midge ever recorded from cheatgrass. Morphological comparisons with related midge species recorded from other plant hosts revealed that this midge from cheatgrass is a new species, described here as Stenodiplosis tectori n. sp. This status was supported by sequence comparisons of a barcode region of the gene encoding the mitochondrial cytochrome c subunit I (CO1) protein in Stenodiplosis tectori n. sp. and three congeners. The present study is the first to report MT-CO1 data in the genus Stenodiplosis. The ingroup Stenodiplosis tectori n. sp. collected in the Balkans grouped in one phylogenetic supported clade, with an average K2P-distance from its closest related congener, S. sorghicola, of 7.73% (SD = 1.10). The findings indicated relatively high year-to-year within-population diversity. Implications for this gall midge's utility as a biological control agent of cheatgrass are discussed.