Tetrigidae of Ethiopia: First Species Delimitation via DNA Barcoding and Description of Three New Species

Tetrigidae is a caeliferan family of Orthoptera constituting a diverse and relatively ancient lineage of small Orthopterans, which has its greatest diversity in tropical and subtropical areas. However, to date, few studies have been conducted on the identification and description of Tetrigidae species in Ethiopia, and even fewer molecular data are available. Hence, we performed the first species delimitation study via DNA barcoding of species belonging to the genera Paratettix, Leptacrydium, Dasyleurotettix, and Morphopoides from Ethiopia. We provide 35 new sequences of the COI gene belonging to six species of these genera. We show that Ethiopian Tetrigidae can be successfully delineated using DNA barcodes, even in cryptic genera such as Paratettix: species delimitation on the basis of this gene was strongly congruent with the phylogenetic tree and morphological assignments. We report three species: Dasyleurotettix infaustus (Walker, 1871), Morphopoides tessmanni (Günther, 1939), and M. folipes (Hancock, 1908) from Ethiopia for the first time. In addition, we describe three new species, which were confirmed with morphological, phylogenetic, and species delimitation methods: Paratettix tanai sp. nov., Paratettix geminus sp. nov., and Leptacrydium naqamteensis sp. nov. Further, we studied Paratettix macrostenus, which is considered a new synonym of P. subpustulatus. Future integrative taxonomic studies, including more material from diverse regions, additional genetic loci and more comprehensive taxon sampling, need to be performed to understand the diversity of Tetrigidae across Africa.