U.S.-Italy Cooperative Research: Phylogenetic Relationshipsin the Meloini (Coleoptera: Meloidae)

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This award will support Professor John Pinto of the University of California Riverside in a research collaboration with Professor Marco Bologna of the Universita degli Studi dell'Aquila, Italy. The researchers intend to undertake phylogenetic studies for the tribe Meloini, a group of approximately 200 species belonging to the beetle family Meloidae. This family is of considerable interest to entomologists because of several distinctive life history traits, and its reputation as including species that are pests of crops and domestic animals. The meloini is currently defined by the larval stage. It includes all genera of the subfamily Meloinae known to have phoretic larvae, i.e. larvae that obtain their food source, in this case bee larvae and provisions, indirectly by attaching to the adult bee. Adults of the tribe do not share any special similarity that indicates group membership. This study proposes to analyze cladistically all available characters in all taxa (at the generic group level) currently assigned to the Meloini, taking into consideration the possibility that larval similarity is due to convergence and not homology. Analysis of unrelated genera in the subfamily Nemognathinae, whose members are all phoretic as larvae, will be particularly instructive in this effort. This research will result in a revised classification of the tribe, greater elucidation of the evolution of phoresy, and new information on the larval stages and behavior of several species of Meloidae.