Acronym: HalAfrEu
Collaborators: Gontran Sonet (JEMU-RBINS), Carl Vangestel (JEMU-RBINS), Massimiliano Virgilio (JEMU-RMCA), Alain Pauly (RBINS), Jean‐Luc Boevé (RBINS), Grégoire Noel (PhD. student ULiege), Nadège Georges (MSc. student UMons)
Year: 2017
Summary: The Halictinae constitute a large subfamily of bees for which a big collection is available at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and the Royal Museum for Central Africa. It is sometimes called the “nightmare taxon” because it contains many species that are difficult to identify. More than 150 species are known in Europe and some hundreds of species in Africa. Recently, the systematics of these bees was profoundly modified following a molecular phylogeny mainly focusing on Nearctic species. For Afrotropical and West Palaearctic species, the classification remains based on morphological traits, which causes incoherences in the classification of some taxa, mainly at the genus and subgenus levels. By studying one to four gene fragments of 172 bees belonging to 150 species and combining them with the gene fragments already published for ca. 100 other bees, we investigate the evolutionary history of several groups of species.
Output:
- Publication: Integrative taxonomy resuscitates two species in the Lasioglossum villosulum complex (Kirby, 1802) (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Halictidae), A. Pauly, G. Noël, G. Sonet, D.G. Notton, J.L. Boevé, 2019, European Journal of Taxonomy, 541.
- Abstract presented at the 7th International Barcode of Life Conference: DNA barcoding of ants from the Galapagos Archipelago: searching endemic and introduced species. Vanderheyden A., Sonet G., Herrera H. W., Delsinne T., Donoso D., Lattke J., De Busschere C., Hendrickx F., Leponce M., Pauly A., Backeljau T. & Dekoninck W., 2017. In: Scientific abstracts from the 7th International Barcode of Life Conference, Genome, vol. 60, pp. 1005.