the cynipoid genus paramblynotus - American Museum of Natural ...

6 BULLETIN AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY NO. 304
Fig. 3.
Phylogenetic relationships among families of Cynipoidea (after Ronquist, 1995b).
group of Decellea and Paramblynotus within
the Mayrellinae (fig. 4).
Here we present a monographic revision of
the genus Paramblynotus based on a large
material assembled from many insect collections
around the world. Included in our study
is also the genus Decellea Benoit, 1956, whose
status as a genus distinct from Paramblynotus
has been controversial, as mentioned above
(Benoit, 1956; Weld, 1962; Ronquist, 1995a).
In total, the studied material comprised 90
species, and it included 18 of the 20 previously
described species of Paramblynotus
and Decellea.
The relationships among the Paramblynotus
and Decellea species were studied based
on qualitative and quantitative characters of
adult morphology. The quantitative characters
were analyzed using a novel implementation
of Finite Mixture Coding (FMC; Strait
et al., 1996) described here for the first time.
We refer to the new method as FMC with k-
means cluster analysis, or FMCK. The
resulting character matrix was analyzed using
standard parsimony methods. Two undescribed
species of Kiefferiella, which is the
sister group of Paramblynotus + Decellea
(Ronquist, 1995a), were used as outgroups.
The cladistic results showed that Decellea
is deeply nested within Paramblynotus and we
therefore synonymize the former with the
latter. Furthermore, based on the cladistic
results, we propose a division of Paramblynotus
into seven monophyletic species
groups, only partly matching the tentative
species groups recognized previously by
Ronquist (1995a). The historical biogeography
of the subfamily Mayrellinae was reconstructed
based on a synthesis of the Paramblynotus
phylogeny and the previous genuslevel
Mayrellinae phylogeny presented by
Ronquist (1995a). The data were analyzed
using dispersal-vicariance analysis (Ronquist,
1997), and paleoenvironmental data were
used to separate alternative, equally parsimonious
reconstructions.
The monograph ends with a taxonomic
revision of the genus Paramblynotus. This
part includes keys to species groups and
species, descriptions or redescriptions of all
the studied species, and summaries of the
available distributional and biological information.
MATERIALS
SPECIMENS EXAMINED
The study is based on 721 adult specimens
borrowed from the insect collections listed