Aspidophorodon (Eoessigia) vera Stekolshchikov & Novgorodova, 2010

Xu, Ying, Jiang, Li-Yun, Chen, Jing, Kholmatov, Bakhtiyor Rustamovich & Qiao, Ge-Xia, 2022, Six new species of Aspidophorodon Verma, 1967 (Hemiptera, Aphididae, Aphidinae) from China, ZooKeys 1106, pp. 1-55 : 1

Aspidophorodon (Eoessigia) vera Stekolshchikov & Novgorodova, 2010

Aspidophorodon (Eoessigia) vera Stekolshchikov & Novgorodova, 2010: 39.

Host plant.

Potentilla fruticosa .

Distribution.

Russia (the Altai Republic).

Biology.

The species feeds along the margins on the underside of leaves of its host plant ( Stekolshchikov and Novgorodova 2010).

DNA barcoding

The final alignments of COI sequences consisted of 658 nucleotides, including 119 parsimony-informative sites. Pairwise sequence divergences of the gene among the Aspidophorodon species are presented in Table 4 . The interspecific genetic distances of new species and known species averaged 6.98% (range: 3.93%-8.97%) for COI closely corresponding to the divergence of Aspidophorodon taxa base on four species (mean: 6.88%; range: 5.29%-7.68%) ( Chen et al. 2015). The validity of species was well-supported on NJ tree (>95% bootstrap) (Fig. 23 ). At the same time, Aspidophorodon cornuatum and Aspidophorodon longituberculatum formed a clade (Fig. 23 ) and the genetic distance between the two species is 0.00%-0.46%, so the result proved A. cornuatum was a junior synonym of A. longituberculatum . However, the subgenera were not monophyletic groups on NJ tree, and this needs more evidence and more samples to prove. In this study, we also followed the traditional taxonomic system to divide two subgenera in Aspidophorodon . According to the distinct morphological characteristics in description and interspecific genetic distances between species, the six new species were supported.

Figures

Figure 23. Neighbour-joining tree for Aspidophorodon samples based on COI sequences.