Department of Life Science, Imperial College London, Ascot, Berkshire, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2012;7(2):e32101. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0032101. Epub 2012 Feb 15.
Much has been written about latitudinal trends in parasitoid diversity and biology, though it is widely recognised that they are a comparatively poorly known group. Here I show that for both braconid and ichneumonid wasps there are highly significant relationships between body size and the mean recorded latitude of species. Numbers of species per genus (surrogates of clades) peaks in the temperate zone for both families contrasting with data from the virtually complete inventories for mammals, birds and monocot plants, suggesting massive under-description of tropical parasitoid faunas. If the ichneumonoids may be expected to show similar trends to mammals, birds and other groups, the implication is that taxonomic work both in terms of active generic revisions, but also likely, the collecting and processing of museum specimens, and selection of taxa for revision, is woefully inadequate to allow latitudinal patterns in biology to be analysed.
关于寄生性昆虫多样性和生物学的纬度趋势已经有很多文献记载，尽管人们普遍认识到它们是一个相对不太了解的群体。在这里，我表明对于膜翅目（包括姬蜂科和茧蜂科）的寄生蜂来说，其体型大小与记录的物种平均纬度之间存在高度显著的关系。对于这两个科来说，属的物种数量（类群的替代物）在温带地区达到峰值，与来自哺乳动物、鸟类和单子叶植物几乎完整目录的数据形成对比，这表明对热带寄生性昆虫区系的大量描述不足。如果可以预期膜翅目寄生蜂与哺乳动物、鸟类和其他类群表现出相似的趋势，那么这意味着在分类学方面，无论是主动的属级修订工作，还是收集和处理博物馆标本，以及选择进行修订的分类单元，都远远不足以允许对生物学的纬度模式进行分析。
