Diversity of parasitoid and parasitic wasps across a latitudinal gradient: Using public DNA records to work within a taxonomic impediment

The diversity of insect parasitoids (Hymenoptera) has long been thought to be anomalous because it doesn’t appear to increase rapidly with decreasing latitude. However, due to the presence of undiscovered cryptic species and the under-sampling of hyper-diverse tropical areas, such apparently anomalous gradients may, in fact, be artifacts of limited geographic and taxonomic sampling. We attempted to circumvent such taxonomic impediments by elucidating a diversity/latitude relationship for parasitoid wasps, using publicly available DNA sequences to quantify diversity (via a species proxy molecular operational taxonomic unit (the DNA Barcode Index Number) and phylogenetic diversity) across a latitudinal gradient of ∼5000 km. We compared these diversity values to the abiotic factors (temperature and precipitation) that may drive the diversity/latitude relationship. We found no significant relationship between either diversity measure with latitude or with the environmental variables. Although ours is the first work to enumerate different DNA-based measures of parasitoid diversity across this geographic scale in a standardized fashion using publicly available sequences, further standardized collections over long time periods and a rapid movement of sequences into the public arena are needed to facilitate the further testing of macroecological trends elucidated with public DNA sequence libraries