Mantodea é uma ordem composta por insetos popularmente conhecidos como louva-a-deus, incluindo aproximadamente 2300 espécies com distribuição principalmente pantropical. Trabalhos recentes trouxeram indícios de que a classificação atual não reflete a história evolutiva da ordem, sendo necessário realizar mais estudos para resolver esse problema. O gênero Stagmatoptera foi criado por Burmeister em 1838 para abrigar as espécies de Mantodea conhecidas por ele que possuíam uma mancha no estigma da tégmina. Com as descrições de novas espécies e o trabalho de outros pesquisadores, a composição do gênero se alterou, e até o início deste trabalho ele incluía 15 espécies. Stagmatoptera foi revisto, tendo como base material depositado em coleções científicas, visando determinar quais espécies eram válidas e se havia espécies não descritas. Também foi investigada a utilidade das genitálias masculina e feminina para estudos taxonômicos. Após o estudo, o número de espécies dentro do gênero é reduzido para 14, com as seguintes alterações: restabelecimento da sinonímia entre Stagmatoptera supplicaria e S. flavipennis, sinonímia entre S. pia e S. nova, sinonímia entre S. femoralis e S. ignota, e a descrição de duas novas espécies. As genitálias se mostraram úteis na distinção entre as espécies, sendo uma fonte de caracteres morfológicos importantes para taxonomia, e possivelmente para estudos filogenéticos. / Mantodea is an order composed by insects popularly known as praying mantises, including about 2300 species with, mainly, a pantropical distribution. Recent works brought to light the possibility that the current classification does not reflect the evolutionary history of the order, thus being necessary more research to solve this problem. The genus Stagmatoptera was created by Burmeister in 1838 to include the Mantodea species he knew, that had a spot on the tegmina. With the description of new species and the work of other scientists the genus composition changed, and at the beginning of this work Stagmatoptera included 15 species. Stagmatoptera was revised using the material deposited in scientific collections, to determine which species were valid and if there were undescribed species. The utility of the male and female genitalia to taxonomic studies was also investigated. After the study, the number of species in the genus is reduced to 14 with the following changes: reestablishment of the synonym between Stagmatoptera supplicaria and S. flavipennis, synonymization between S. pia and S. nova, synonymization between S. femoralis and S. ignota, and the description of two new species. The genitalia proved to be useful in the distinction among the species, being an important source of morphological characters to taxonomic studies and, possibly, phylogenetic studies.

Mantodea é uma ordem composta por insetos popularmente conhecidos como louva-a-deus, incluindo aproximadamente 2300 espécies com distribuição principalmente pantropical. Trabalhos recentes trouxeram indícios de que a classificação atual não reflete a história evolutiva da ordem, sendo necessário realizar mais estudos para resolver esse problema. O gênero Stagmatoptera foi criado por Burmeister em 1838 para abrigar as espécies de Mantodea conhecidas por ele que possuíam uma mancha no estigma da tégmina. Com as descrições de novas espécies e o trabalho de outros pesquisadores, a composição do gênero se alterou, e até o início deste trabalho ele incluía 15 espécies. Stagmatoptera foi revisto, tendo como base material depositado em coleções científicas, visando determinar quais espécies eram válidas e se havia espécies não descritas. Também foi investigada a utilidade das genitálias masculina e feminina para estudos taxonômicos. Após o estudo, o número de espécies dentro do gênero é reduzido para 14, com as seguintes alterações: restabelecimento da sinonímia entre Stagmatoptera supplicaria e S. flavipennis, sinonímia entre S. pia e S. nova, sinonímia entre S. femoralis e S. ignota, e a descrição de duas novas espécies. As genitálias se mostraram úteis na distinção entre as espécies, sendo uma fonte de caracteres morfológicos importantes para taxonomia, e possivelmente para estudos filogenéticos. / Mantodea is an order composed by insects popularly known as praying mantises, including about 2300 species with, mainly, a pantropical distribution. Recent works brought to light the possibility that the current classification does not reflect the evolutionary history of the order, thus being necessary more research to solve this problem. The genus Stagmatoptera was created by Burmeister in 1838 to include the Mantodea species he knew, that had a spot on the tegmina. With the description of new species and the work of other scientists the genus composition changed, and at the beginning of this work Stagmatoptera included 15 species. Stagmatoptera was revised using the material deposited in scientific collections, to determine which species were valid and if there were undescribed species. The utility of the male and female genitalia to taxonomic studies was also investigated. After the study, the number of species in the genus is reduced to 14 with the following changes: reestablishment of the synonym between Stagmatoptera supplicaria and S. flavipennis, synonymization between S. pia and S. nova, synonymization between S. femoralis and S. ignota, and the description of two new species. The genitalia proved to be useful in the distinction among the species, being an important source of morphological characters to taxonomic studies and, possibly, phylogenetic studies.

The relatively small insect order Mantodea (praying mantises) is comprised of approximately 2,366 described species distributed in 436 genera. Members of the group occupy diverse habitats and are distributed across the globe, though their greatest numbers and diversity are concentrated primarily in the tropics. Though continental endemism is common, many groups have a broad global distribution. An immense diversity of morphology is exhibited across the order with adult mantises ranging in size from 2cm to ~25cm, and appearing like a dead leaf, a piece of quartz rock, or a blade of grass. The diversification and specialization of mantises in ecologically diverse and biogeographically dispersed habitats suggest interesting questions about their morphological and behavioral adaptations. Despite their considerable popularity and consistent presence in the history of humanity, praying mantises have received surprising little attention from a phylogenetic or evolutionary standpoint. Though taxonomic studies have been thorough, discrepancies among classifications suggest wide latitude in the interpretation of morphological characters and their relative importance for grouping taxa. To address the lack of evolutionary knowledge surrounding praying mantises, the specific goals of this project were to: a) Reconstruct a comprehensive phylogeny for Mantodea using molecular characters; b) Use the phylogeny to elucidate character system evolution including hunting strategy, auditory evolution, and morphological convergences; and c) Investigate biogeographic patterns and determine the origins of the modern Mantodea. A comprehensive taxonomic and distributional sampling of Mantodea, covering virtually all higher-level groups, was assembled to reconstruct the phylogeny for the order. Sequence data were generated from five mitochondrial and four nuclear loci for 331 mantis species along with ten cockroach and termite species as outgroups. The resulting phylogenetic hypotheses served as the first glimpse of mantis evolutionary relationships and provided a template for further investigation. Only 7 of 15 families, 16 of 48 subfamilies, and 11 of 46 tribes were recovered as monophyletic indicating that phylogeny is largely incongruent with current mantis classification. As is the case in many other orders of insects, 'key characters' that do not reflect phylogeny are largely responsible for delimiting the groups. An investigation of mantis hunting strategy revealed clear transitions from generalist hunting mantises to the more derived strategies of cursorial and ambush hunting. In fact, the ambush hunting strategy appears to have evolved once, which led to a major diversification within the order. Some praying mantises have sensitive ultrasonic hearing arising from a unique 'cyclopean' ear located in the ventral metathorax. This project explored the evolutionary history of the mantis auditory system by integrating large anatomical, neurophysiological, behavioral, and molecular databases. Using an 'auditory phylogeny' based on 13 morphological characters, a primitively earless form of metathoracic anatomy was indentified in several extant taxa. In addition, there are five distinct mantis auditory systems. Three of these can be identified anatomically, and the other two can only be detected neurophysiologically. Mapping these results onto a phylogenetic tree derived from molecular data, shows that the cyclopean mantis ear evolved once 85-90 mya. All the other auditory system types are either varying degrees of secondary loss, or are recent innovations that each occurred independently multiple times. The neurophysiological response to ultrasound is remarkably consistent across all taxa tested, as is the multi-component, in-flight behavior triggered by ultrasound. Thus, mantises have an ancient, highly conserved auditory neural-behavioral system that probably arose for evasion of echolocating predators. Modern bat families diverged ca. 63 mya, but the echolocating ancestors of bats appeared earlier. Alternatively, non-bat predators may have driven the evolution of the unique mantis auditory systems. Mapping biogeographic regions on the phylogeny demonstrated that our results adhere closer to geographic distribution than to the current classification. Specific patterns in distribution suggest that major morphological convergences have confounded taxonomists ability to construct natural groups. It was found that major mantis lineages diverged prior to the isolation of geographic regions and subsequent ecomorphic specializations within these regions led to convergences in morphology. Divergence time estimations place the origins of Mantodea at the beginning of the Jurassic with modern mantises originating on Gondwanaland in the Early Cretaceous. The first major divergence among modern mantises occurred as a result of the splitting of South America from Africa. The subsequent breakup of Gondwanaland continents spurred numerous divergences within the order and led to the contemporary paraphyletic assemblages of taxa within each biogeographic region. In fact, most divergences between Afrotropical and Indomalayan lineages resulted from the slow dissociation between Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Our results also suggest that Antarctica played an important role as a biological conduit during the diversification of some Afrotropical and Indomalayan lineages. Further, Antarctica facilitated the repeated invasions of South America and Australia prior to the separation of these two continents from Antarctica during the Eocene. When India slammed into Asia around 50 million years ago, it released a flood of mantises into Asia and Southeast Asia that diversified and currently comprise the largest component of Indomalayan taxa. The origins, secondary invasions, and regional extinctions have created an order of insects with complex distributional and evolutionary histories.

La forêt atlantique brésilienne est un des points sensibles de biodiversité avec une richesse spécifique et des risques d’extinction élevés. Cette forêt est située le long de la côte atlantique brésilienne, s’étendant jusqu’au Paraguay vers le Sud et à l’Argentine dans l’intérieur des terres. Du fait des gradients longitudinal et altitudinal, de la géologie complexe et de la diversité des sols, cette forêt comprend une diversité exceptionnelle de paysages et d’écosystèmes qui ont permis à cette riche biodiversité de se développer. Cependant, cette dernière encourt des risques extrêmes d’extinction du fait des densités et des tailles de populations humaines locales les plus élevées en Amérique du Sud. La forêt atlantique est ainsi aujourd’hui réduite à moins de 5% de sa surface originelle, répartie dans des fragments épars. En dépit de cette richesse spécifique reconnue, beaucoup reste à comprendre au sujet de plusieurs composantes de la biodiversité et de leur origine. Parmi les groupes encore mal connus figurent en particulier les insectes. Dans le but de combler cette lacune, j’ai étudié dans cette thèse un genre de blatte endémique de la forêt atlantique, Monastria Saussure, 1864 (Blattodea, Blaberinae). Je me suis focalisé sur sa taxonomie, sa phylogéographie et sur la contribution des données de collections d’histoire naturelle à la modélisation de l’aire de distribution. L’étude de la taxonomie a consisté à entreprendre la révision du genre avec la re-description des espèces espèces déjà connues et la description de nouvelles espèces. Les descriptions des espèces connues étaient fort anciennes et la description (et redescription) a donc inclus la définition de nouveaux caractères, ainsi qu’une étude des genitalia. Des problèmes nomenclaturaux anciens ont été également résolus, une clé d’identification des espèces ainsi qu’une clé d’identification des larves des genres de Blaberinae endémiques de la forêt atlantique ont été construites. La deuxième étude concernait l’analyse de la diversification et de la distribution du genre Monastria dans la forêt atlantique brésilienne. Cette analyse a indiqué l’importance des impacts différentiels des changements de température durant le dernier maximum glaciaire entre les parties Nord et Sud de la forêt atlantique, ceci résultant dans le patron de distribution présent. La troisième étude est une évaluation de l’intérêt des données disponibles dans les collections d’histoire naturelle concernant Monastria pour inférer son aire de répartition en se basant sur des modèles de niches écologiques (ENM), et en utilisant les données issues de l’échantillonnage de terrain ciblé sur Monastria pour valider les résultats. Nous montrons ici que le lot de données des collections est biaisé dans l’espace environmental. Le sur-échantillonnage dans une classe de climat conduit à construire des modèles d’aires favorables plus restreints que ceux de la distribution réelle de Monastria. Ces biais augmentent donc la spécificité des modèles et réduisent leur sensibilité. Pour résoudre ce problème, nous avons conçu deux sortes d’analyse de raréfaction et montré que la suppression aléatoire de points dans la classe climatique la plus biaisée augmente de manière très efficace la sensibilité du modèle de niche climatique. / The Brazilian Atlantic forest is one of the biodiversity hotspots with the richest species diversity and threat. It is located along the Brazilian Atlantic coast going south til Paraguay and Argentina in the interior of the continent. Due to its longitudinal and altitudinal gradients, complex geology and diversity of soils it harbors an enormous diversity of landscapes and ecosystems that gave rise to its rich biodiversity. However, this biodiversity is extremely threatened because this region is the one with the highest population size and density in south America. So, the Atlantic forest is now limited to less than 5% of its original surface and distributed in scattered fragments. Despite the recognized species richness, much remains to be known about several components of this biodiversity and their origin. Among the groups still poorly known are the insects. In order to contribute to bridge this gap, in this thesis I studied one genus of cockroach endemic from the Atlantic forest, Monastria Saussure, 1864 (Blaberidae, Blaberinae). I focused on the taxonomy, phylogeography and on the contribution of the data existing in natural history collections to model the distribution range. The study of the taxonomy consisted in the revision of the genus with the re-description of already known species and description of new ones. Since the known species were described very early, the description (and re-description) comprised the definition of new characters, and consideration paid to genitalia. In addition to that, old nomenclatural problems were solved, a key to species’ identification was provided, a key to the identification of nymphs of the genera of Blaberinae endemic to the Atlantic forest were provided. The second study was aimed to understand the diversification and distribution of the genus Monastria in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. This analysis indicates the importance of differential impacts of shifts in temperature between the Southern and Northeastern part of the Atlantic forest in the Last Glacial Maximum for explaining the present pattern of distribution. The third study is an evaluation of the data concerning Monastria available in Natural History Collections for estimating its distribution range based on Ecological Niche Models (ENM), and using the data from the field work designed to assess the presence of Monastria to validate the results. Here we showed that the dataset is biased in the environmental space. This oversampling in a climate class leads to models with suitable areas much smaller than that of the real distribution of Monastria. These biases increase model’s specificity and reduced sensitivity. To overcome this problem, we designed two forms of rarefaction and showed deleting points at random in the most biased climate class is very powerful to increase the sensitivity of the ENM.

Polyneoptera is an assemblage of eleven insect orders comprising the "orthopteroid" insects. It includes familiar insects such as grasshoppers, roaches, termites, earwigs and preying mantises; as well as the more obscure web-spinners, angel insects and ice-crawlers. We present a phylogenetic analysis of the polyneopteran orders based on 18S rDNA, 28S rDNA, Histone 3, and a coded morphology matrix for an extensive sampling of taxa. We investigate the use of congruence between separate datasets as an a priori measure of alignment quality. Our results support the paraphyly of Polyneoptera, the monophyly of Dictyoptera, sister taxon relationships between Embiidina + Phasmatodea and Dermaptera + Zoraptera, and a relatively basal placement of Plecoptera. The analyses also support a sister taxon relationship between the newly described Mantophasmatodea and Grylloblattodea, a small order of cryophilic insects confined to the northwestern Americas and northeastern Asia. This placement coupled with the morphological disparity of the two groups validates the creation of a new order for Mantophasmatodea. Our results also suggest the Direct Optimization (formerly Optimization Alignment) produces alignments that are more predictable across the parameter landscape than alignment via CLUSTAL X, as measured by congruence among independent data partitions. Dense taxon sampling and phylogenetic analysis of six molecular markers (12S, 16S, 18S, 28S, COII, and H3) and morphological data for the order Plecoptera demonstrates that the subordinal groups Arctoperlaria and Antarctoperlaria are monophyletic. Euholognatha and Systellognatha are also monophyletic, with the exception of the genus Megaleuctra which is the basal lineage for the order and deserves recognition as a distinct family (Megaleuctridae). Notonemouridae is strongly supported as a monophyletic clade. Within the Systellognatha Styloperlidae is the basal lineage, followed by Peltoperlidae then Pteronarcyidae, and Perloidea is a strongly supported monophyletic group with Chloroperlidae as sister taxon to Perlidae + Perlodidae. The family Gripopterygidae is strongly supported as paraphyletic. Many Plecoptera (stoneflies) exhibit a pre-mating communication known as "drumming." Species of the genus Isogenoides have complex drumming behavior in which (i) the male calls the female by tapping his abdomen against the substrate, (ii) the female answers with her own distinctive tapping, and (iii) the male responds with a confirmatory series of taps. These drumming patterns are specific to individual species and may vary within a species to form distinct dialects. Phylogenetic analysis for the genus based on six molecular markers (12S, 16S, 18S, 28S, COII, and H3) supports Yugus as its nearest extant relative and I. hansoni as the basal lineage within the genus. Drumming behavioral characters appear to be largely incongruent with the phylogeny.

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Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:48:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T14:00:58Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 09622.pdf: 5768165 bytes, checksum: e2892f39925cad85d839fbede925fbad (MD5) / Tese (Doutoramento) / IPEN/T / Instituto de Pesquisas Energeticas e Nucleares - IPEN/CNEN-SP