Name: Chirlei Dias de Brito
Type: PhD thesis
Publication date: 25/08/2021
Advisor:
Name | Role |
---|---|
Celso Oliveira Azevedo | Advisor * |
GEANE OLIVEIRA DE LANES | Co-advisor * |
Examining board:
Name | Role |
---|---|
Angelica Maria Penteado Martins Dias | External Examiner * |
Celso Oliveira Azevedo | Advisor * |
Frederico Falcão Salles | External Alternate * |
GEANE OLIVEIRA DE LANES | Co advisor * |
Manoel Martins Dias Filho | External Examiner * |
MARCUS VINÍCIUS SCHERRER DE ARAÚJO | External Alternate * |
Nelson Wanderley Perioto | External Examiner * |
Orlando Tobias Silveira | External Examiner * |
Summary: The mesopleuron of Bethylidae has many characters that are
constantly used in alpha-taxonomic and cladistic studies.
However, the understanding of these structures is still not clear
and the works that analyzed them do so in a superficial and
independent way, which often implies in propositions of mistaken
homologies and confusion of terms. In the first chapter, a
morphological study and literature review were made in order to
standardize the terms used in the mesopleuron. Our study resulted
in an anatomic glossary with 49 terms that presented a large
number of synonyms and polysemies. The glossary standardizes the
terms used in the Bethylidae mesopleuron and in other Hymenoptera
groups, which will facilitate hypotheses of primary homology in
comparative biology. In the second chapter, we described the
general mesopleural anatomy of Bethylidae, matching external and
internal (muscles and apodemes) structures, and then proposed
primary homologies. After surveying the characters and their
respective states, we selected ten of them and reconstructed the
ancestral state of the main mesopleural structures using the
maximum-likelihood method. For this, we built a phylogeny of
Bethylidae using the genes COI and 28s for the maximum-likelihood
and Bayesian inference methods. Our analysis yielded similar
results, but we chose Bayesian inference to perform the character
evolution analyses as it presented better clade support. In both
phylogenies, Bethylidae and all subfamilies were recovered as
monophyletic with high clade support values. The study of
mesopleural anatomy allowed exploring and discussing characters
and their present states not only in Bethylidae, but also in
Hymenoptera; muscle data made inferences about the biology of
some genera of Epyrinae and female Pristocerinae; and the
reconstruction of the ancestral state showed many characters that
arose independently in Bethylidae subfamilies.