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Brachyzapus Gauld & Dubois

(Life: Kingdom: Metazoa (animals); Phylum: Arthropoda; Class: Hexapoda; Order: Hymenoptera;  Superfamily: Ichneumonoidea; Family: Ichneumonidae; Subfamily: Pimplinae)

Brachyzapus Gauld & Dubois, 2006. Type species: Polysphincta tenuiabdominalis Uchida, 1941.

Brachyzapus glaber Varga & Reshchikov, 2018
Brachyzapus greengoblin Varga & Di Giovanni, 2018

Distribution

Uganda. Also Oriental and Palaearctic regions.

Biology

The Eastern Palaearctic species, Brachyzapus nikkoensis (Uchida, 1928), is a parasitoid of two spider species: the barn funnel weaver or domestic house spider, Tegenaria domestica (Clerck, 1757), and the web-weaving spider, Agelena limbata Thorell, 1897 (Agelenidae) (Gauld & Dubois, 2006). The penultimate instar of the ichneumonid  wasp manipulates the host spider to form “veils” of very fine and dense threads covering both the spider and parasitoid larva within the tunnel of the funnel web (Matsumoto, 2008).

References

Gauld, I.D. & Dubois, J. 2006. Phylogeny of the Polysphincta group of genera (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae; Pimplinae): a taxonomic revision of spider ectoparasitoids. Systematic Entomology. 31: 529–564.
Pham, N.T., Broad, G.R., Matsumoto, R. & Wagele, W.J. 2012. First record of the genus Brachyzapus Gauld and Dubois (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae: Pimplinae) from Vietnam, with descriptions of six new species. Journal of Natural History. 46: 1639–1661.
Matsumoto, R. 2008. “Veils” against predators: modified web structure of a host spider induced by an ichneumonid parasitoid, Brachyzapus nikkoensis (Uchida) (Hymenoptera). Journal of Insect Behavior 22: 39–48. DOI: 10.1007/s10905-008-9152-1
Uchida, T. & Momoi S. 1958. On the species of Polysphincta Gravenhorst and Zatypota Förster from Japan (Hymenoptera, Ichneumonidae). Insecta Matsumurana 22: 22–30.

Varga O, Reshchikov A, Giovanni FD. 2018. First record of the genus Brachyzapus Gauld & Dubois, 2006 (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae: Pimplinae) from the Afrotropical region, with descriptions of two new species. Zootaxa 4377: 581–586. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4377.4.8.

Credits

Photographs © Oleksandr Varga (Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology, NAS of Ukraine) or © Filippo di Giovanni (Dept. of Agriculture, Food and Environment, University of Pisa).

Map illustration © Simon van Noort (Iziko Museums of South Africa).


Web author Simon van Noort (Iziko South African Museum)

 

Citation: van Noort, S. 2024. WaspWeb: Hymenoptera of the World. URL: www.waspweb.org (accessed on <day/month/year>).

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