Atteva zebra Duckworth 1967

Atteva zebra Duckworth

Atteva zebra Duckworth, 1967: 71. Type: Barro Colorado Island, Canal Zone, PANA- MA (WD and SS Duckworth collectors, 9 th May 1964) (USNM).

Forewings. The zebra pattern makes this species readily distinct from the other species presented here (Figure 3D).

Habitat and food plants. A. zebra is the common webworm of shoot tips of Simarouba amara saplings and adult trees in ACG rain forest (n = 123) It is more abundant than A. pustulella, but may be found on the same individual tree with A. pustulella and an occasional A. aurea in anthropogenic rain forest habitats. It has never been found on S. glauca or in ACG dry forest.

Distribution. Known only from Costa Rica and Panama.

Concluding remarks

This case study demonstrates the value of combining morphological, ecological and DNA barcode information when working with similar species. Atteva is an example where seemingly confusing morphological and ecological patterns, can be definitively partitioned in the light of discrete data such as DNA sequences. The integration and synthesis of inventories, each one necessarily regionally focused, is facilitated by DNA barcodes, an efficiently communicated online character system. This was demonstrated by the fact that taxonomic problems surrounding the ailanthus webworm moth persisted in the ACG for 25 years and surfaced only recently. From the starting point of DNA barcode analyses it has been relatively straightforward to reach a taxonomic conclusion by joining taxonomic knowledge in the form of the name-bearing types with ecological and morphological information. The purported difficultly in obtaining barcodes from type material has been viewed as an obstacle to the melding of DNA barcoding information with other taxonomic information. Recent studies (Hausmann et al. 2009), including this one, show that this is not necessarily the case.