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Hunting for Wasps In-between: the Use of the Winkler Extractor to Sample Leaf Litter Hymenoptera

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Abstract

Soil ecosystems are considered biodiversity hotspots. Most of terrestrial organisms depend almost exclusively on soils at least during some part of their life cycle. Although there is an intensive effort to understand the dynamics involving communities of soil animals, most groups are unappreciated in faunal inventories, such as some parasitic Hymenoptera with soil or litter hosts (SLH Hymenoptera), which are considered one of the largest and most diverse groups of soil- or litter-dwelling animals. Contrasting with flight interception traps, techniques that sample soil and litter specimens normally present low costs and easy transportation, being easily replicated within a site. Among them, the Winkler extractor is a useful technique to sample cryptic species associated with leaf litter. The aim of the present work was to describe the SLH Hymenoptera fauna collected in a pool of samples, using a technique to sample leaf litter arthropods. In this work, we report a total of 600 specimens belonging to Hymenoptera (excluding ants), belonging to 15 families distributed within 24 subfamilies, in samples of leaf litter obtained using the Winkler extractor. We observed that this technique is promising for sampling SLH Hymenoptera and should be considered as a complement for inventories of the Hymenoptera fauna.

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful to two anonymous reviewers for their critical reading and for valuable suggestions to previous versions of this manuscript. This work was supported by the Brazilian Council of Research and Scientific Development (CNPq grant 302462/2016-3) and the Partnerships for Enhanced Engagement in Research (PEER) Science Program (NAS/USAID – project 3-188). TSRS thanks the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) for the grant received (process 40001016005P5).

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  1. Depto de Zoologia, Univ Federal do Paraná, Caixa Postal 19020, Centro Politécnico, Curitiba, Paraná, 81531-980, Brasil

    T S R Silva & R M Feitosa

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  1. T S R Silva
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Correspondence to T S R Silva.

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Edited by Fabio S Nascimento – FFCLRP/USP

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Silva, T.S.R., Feitosa, R.M. Hunting for Wasps In-between: the Use of the Winkler Extractor to Sample Leaf Litter Hymenoptera. Neotrop Entomol 46, 711–718 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13744-017-0524-0

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