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An Evaluation of the Parasitoid Community of Neodiprion lecontei and Neodiprion pinetum

Kephart, Carson David
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1714745732624747

Abstract Details

2024, Master of Science, Ohio State University, Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology.
A major goal of evolutionary biologists is to understand how biodiversity is generated. Hyper-diverse taxa can serve as informative systems to study this question. Some of the most diverse groups of organisms are phytophagous and parasitoid insects. Phytophagous and parasitoids insects are characterized by a close association with their hosts. To that end, recent work has suggested that this close host association and the shifting from one host to another is the mechanism for generating such great diversity. This idea has been tested in many systems, but how host association impacts organism at different trophic levels is less understood. One candidate to study this question is the parasitoid community of the pine sawfly sister species Neodiprion lecontei and N. pinetum. Due to their status as pest insects, there is a large amount of information available for these sawflies. However, their parasitoid communities remain relatively unknown. To begin to rectify the understudy of this parasitoid community, I conducted a morphological and genetic species delimitation of available parasitoids reared from N. lecontei and N. pinetum larvae. Morphological species delimitation resulted in nine Hymenopteran parasitoid species, mostly belonging to the family Ichneumonidae and one species in Perilampidae. The molecular genetic species delimitation used the mitochondrial gene COI to delineate species. This was not successful at species-level resolution but was generally successful at the genus level. The second goal of this thesis is to understand how the environment influences the distribution of parasitoid species. I conducted a multivariate analysis of parasitoid community composition and several environmental variables pertaining to host use, temperature, and precipitation. A distance-based redundancy analysis (dbRDA) was conducted on the parasitoid communities of N. lecontei and N. pinetum. The pine host used by the host sawfly was found to significantly explain 8.6% N. lecontei parasitoid occurrence variation. The maximum temperature recorded significantly explained 8.1% of parasitoid occurrence variation in the N. pinetum dataset. Finally, these results are discussed in the context of this and other systems and future research is suggested.
Robin Bagley (Advisor)
Frances Sivakoff (Committee Member)
Norman Johnson (Committee Member)
88 p.
Biology; Ecology; Entomology; Genetics
parasitoid; Hymenoptera; COI; barcoding;

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Kephart, C. D. (2024). An Evaluation of the Parasitoid Community of Neodiprion lecontei and Neodiprion pinetum [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1714745732624747

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Kephart, Carson. An Evaluation of the Parasitoid Community of Neodiprion lecontei and Neodiprion pinetum. 2024. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1714745732624747.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Kephart, Carson. "An Evaluation of the Parasitoid Community of Neodiprion lecontei and Neodiprion pinetum." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2024. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1714745732624747

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1714745732624747
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.