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Forest soil and leaf litter support diverse arthropod mesofauna for which diversity dynamics is challenging to study due to the high number of species and specimens, small body size and limited taxonomic knowledge.Immature stages (larvae) are even harder to identify than adults, as their morphology is largely unknown. Therefore, larvae are often ignored, even though they may form a substantial proportion of specimens collected, are less mobile than adults and their exclusion may provide an incomplete diversity profile.Here, we use Oxford Nanopore DNA barcoding to investigate whether the inclusion of larvae provides a more complete taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity profiles in leaf litter beetles (Coleoptera) from a subtropical forest in Taiwan.Our results indicate that larvae represent up to 38% of beetle specimens per sample, but most of them belong to 2–3 common species. Larvae of most beetle species are rarely collected repeatedly or in multiple specimens, possibly due to special habitat requirements or high seasonality.Taxonomic, phylogenetic and incidence‐based functional diversity measures were not affected by the exclusion of larvae in the Staphylinidae dataset but were strongly biased in all‐beetle dataset, especially when only common or abundant species were considered. Taxonomic beta diversity was not affected by the omission of larvae.Our results indicate that immature stages may be omitted in ecological studies of arthropods in case both adults and larvae co‐occur in the same habitat, and the sites are sampled repeatedly. Caution is needed (1) in groups in which larvae and adults do not inhabit the same environment or strongly differ in biology, (2) when rare species are omitted or (3) when functional diversity is calculated from abundance data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Species distribution models (SDMs) have conventionally been used for evaluating the distribution of individual species, but they can also be used, through comparing different SDMs, to evaluate the geographic similarity between taxa. In this study, we used a parasite and host system to infer the geographic overlaps between species with tight biological interaction, for example, parasites and their obligate host. Specifically, we used the horsehair worm Chordodes formosanus and its three mantis hosts to study the extent of niche overlap. We retrieved presence points for the host species and the parasite, and then we built SDMs with MaxEnt implemented in ENMeval using selected bioclim variables (based on variance inflation factor values) at 30s scale. The models showed that the hosts and parasite do not occur in the high elevation areas in Taiwan, which is expected based on their biology. Interestingly, the predicted parasite distribution included areas without collection records, implying local extinction or sampling bias. We subsequently evaluated niche overlap between hosts and the parasite according to five similarity indices (Schoener's D, I statistic, relative rank, Pearson correlation coefficient, and the rank correlation coefficient rho). Our models showed a high similarity of SDM predictions between hosts and the parasite. There were differences among metrics for which host shared the highest similarity with the parasite, but the majority of the results indicated that the Japanese boxing mantis had the highest niche similarity with the horsehair worm. The choice of the niche overlap metric to use can uncover information on the parasite's ecology, which can be important for endangered species. SDMs are reliable tools for host and parasite conservation management and could help improve our understanding of parasite biology and ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alpha taxonomy is fundamental for many biological fields. Delineation of the species boundary, however, can be challenging in a species complex, where different species share a similar morphology and diagnostic characters may not be available. In this context, integrative approaches that incorporate molecular and morphological data sets, and account for speciation history can be helpful to alpha taxonomy. Different approaches to species delimitation based on different assumptions are complementary and by integrating the results from multiple approaches we can generate a more reliable and objective taxonomic decision. In this study, we applied three molecular approaches to species delimitation and inferred the demographic history based on an isolation with migration model to test a morphologically based taxonomic hypothesis for the Cylindera pseudocylindriformis complex. We discuss the association between genetic divergence and microhabitat specialisation, and further corroborate that C. subtilis sp. nov. is a valid new species by integrating the results from model-based species delimitation and the genealogical divergence index. We argue that genetic endemism can occur at a small geographic scale, even in a winged insect like tiger beetles. Our results also indicated that there may still be undocumented species diversity of Taiwanese Cylindera remaining to be discovered. ZooBank LSID: urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:9DEC1432-365C-4872-8D06-73B95F30624F Estimating species diversity is critical for all biological fields but objectively determining species diversity can be challenging. We investigated the speciation history and explored the species diversity in a tiger beetle species complex using an integrative approach. We also demonstrated that allopatric speciation and population subdivision could occur at fine geographic scale even if the system has been expected to exhibit high dispersal ability. Therefore, neglected species diversity may still hide in plain sight in many empirical systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]