The species of Megaphragma Timberlake (Hymenoptera: Trichogrammatidae) from Argentina

Abstract

Trichogrammatidae are an almost worldwide family of egg parasitoids that consist of 88 genera (Pinto 2006). Species of Megaphragma Timberlake (tribe Oligositini) are egg parasitoids of Thysanoptera. Fifteen species are assigned to Megaphragma, but only three have been reported from the Neotropical region (Noyes 2002). Megaphragma mymaripenne Timberlake (1924) has been recorded previously from Argentina (De Santis 1970), but M. striatum Viggiani (1997) was known only from Mexico, and M. caribea Delvare (1993) is known only from Guadeloupe (Noyes 2002; Pinto 2006). Recently, one of us (E. Luft) reared Megaphragma sp. from eggs of Thysanoptera on corn in San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, and this record instigated a review of all material of the genus recorded from Argentina. We searched for specimens deposited in the major entomological collections of Argentina: Instituto Fundación Miguel Lillo (San Miguel de Tucumán) (IMLA), Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardino Rivadavia” (Buenos Aires city) (MBA), and Museo de Ciencias Naturales de La Plata (La Plata, Buenos Aires province) (MLPA), but found specimens only in MLPA. In addition, one of us (G. Viggiani) studied material of Megaphragma from Argentina preserved in two other collections, that of the University of California Riverside (UCR) and of the Universidad Rómulo Gallegos, Venezuela (URGV). The results of this study are presented here.