Abai, MR

6th International Congress of DipterologySurviving the test of time: Testing species boundaries andthe subfamily concepts in Dolichopodidae using South-eastAsian speciesLim, S.G. (1), W.S. Hwang (1), P. Grootaert (2) & R. Meier (1)(1) Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, 14 Science Dr 4,Block S2 #02-01, Singapore 117543(2) Department of Entomology, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Vautierstreet29, B-1000 Brussels, BelgiumThe Dolichopodidae with its 7000 described species is particularlyspeciose in the Oriental and Australasian Regions, but little is known aboutmany of the diverse genera. Here, we report the results of a molecularstudy on the terrestrial genus Teuchophorus and the mainly marinegenus Thinophilus. We find that interspecific distances for mitochondrialgenes are small in the former and remarkably large in the latter, thusrequiring conserved genes to resolve relationships. These results imply thatThinophilus may be a very old genus. We also document that theintraspecific variability can be very high for Teuchophorus and thatidentifying species based on COI sequences as proposed by the DNAbarcoding consortium is not feasible. We attempt to place Thinophilus,Teuchophorus, and several incertae sedis genera from South-east Asia intothe subfamily classification of Dolichopodidae by using information fromseveral genes (e.g., 12S, 16S, 18S, 28S). Our results agreed withmorphological data on the placement of Teuchophorus and Thinophilus inthe sub-families Sympycninae and Hydrophorinae respectively. However,several other genera are difficult to place based on morphological andmolecular data.Key Words: Dolichopodidae, South-east Asia, genetic distances∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗153