Carlos Ruiz

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of La Laguna

Background The genus Trichopoda Berthold, 1827 is distributed in the Neotropical and Nearctic Regions and some species are very important for biological control. During the last decades, the species Trichopoda pictipennis Bigot, 1876 has received much attention. It is of Neotropical origin, but it has been introduced throughout the western Palaearc...

Pollinators are fundamental for plant reproduction in natural and agricultural ecosystems. However, their populations are declining worldwide, threatening the functioning of the ecosystem service they provide. The factors driving this change are manifold, but land use changes and interspecific transmission of pathogens between managed and wild bees...

Recent field surveys in the eastern Canary Islands (Spain), followed by contributions of new occurrence records through the citizen science platform iNaturalist.com and the social media photo repository Flickr.com have revealed the presence of an overlooked small carder bee species (genus Pseudoanthidium Friese (Megachilidae: Anthidiini)) on the is...

The Canary Islands are an archipelago of volcanic origin, located off north-west Africa comprising eight islands. Fuerteventura and Lanzarote are the oldest (20 and 15 millon years old, respectively) and the easternmost islands. The order Diptera is one of the most relevant taxa in the Canary Islands as they constitute the second highest species ri...

Pollinators play a crucial role in ecosystems globally, ensuring the seed production of most flowering plants. They are threatened by global changes and knowledge of their distribution at the national and continental levels is needed to implement efficient conservation actions, but this knowledge is still fragmented and/or difficult to access. As a...

The 'western seed bug', known as Leptoglossus occidentalis , is considered a global invasive species that has experienced a recent rapid expansion worldwide, becoming an important pest species for coniferous forests. With the 'Canary Islands early-warning network for the detection and intervention of invasive exotic species' (RedEXOS), this species...

An essential prerequisite to safeguard pollinator species is characterisation of the multifaceted diversity of crop pollinators and identification of the drivers of pollinator community changes across biogeographical gradients. The extent to which intensive agriculture is associated with the homogenisation of biological communities at large spatial...

The patchy distribution of the hypogean environment and the adaptations required to thrive in this special habitat have been proposed to constrain the dispersal capacity of hypogean organisms, resulting in processes of diversification even at small geographical scales. Counterintuitively, a recent detailed morphological study on the variability of...

Por vez primera se presenta al mundo científico y a todas las personas con inquietudes hacia el conocimiento de la valiosa biodiversidad insular los ciclos de vida completos de los Ropalóceros de Canarias, nuestras queridas mariposas diurnas, con una puesta en valor de su clasificación taxonómica y un tratamiento pormenorizado de los detalles morfo...

Stingless bees are one of the most significant pollinators within tropical dry forests, and both are threatened by the impact of human activity on the environment. The loss of habitat of this pollinator is due to activities like deforestation of large areas for the purpose of intensive agriculture, agricultural burning, urbanization processes, and...

Demand for food is growing along with the human population, leading to an increase in plant production. Many crops are pollinated by insects, so the global demand for managed pollinators is also increasing. The honey bee has traditionally been considered the main provider of crop pollination services. For providing it beekeepers seasonally transpor...

In this study, we update the knowledge about wild bees of the genus Hylaeus in the Canary Islands and discuss the possible effect on the phenology of exotic species on the endemic ones. Our records come both from entomological samplings and citizen science through photos registered in social networks. An additional molecular approach was performed...

Transferred copies of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) into the nuclear genome (numts) have been reported in several Hymenoptera species, even at a high density in the honey bee nuclear genome. The accidental amplification of numts in phylogenetic studies focused on mtDNA highlights the importance of a correct determination of numts and their related mtDN...

The stingless bee genus Scaptotrigona is widely distributed across tropical Mexico and includes economically important species used in stingless beekeeping. As Scaptotrigona colonies are currently or potentially translocated across regions, it is important to analyze the extent of genetic diversity from different populations. Herein, every analyzed...

Viruses are omnipresent, yet the knowledge on drivers of viral prevalence in wild host populations is often limited. Biotic factors, such as sympatric managed host species, as well as abiotic factors, such as climatic variables, are likely to impact viral prevalence. Managed and wild bees, which harbor several multi-host viruses with a mostly fecal...

Insect pollination is crucial for the maintenance of natural and managed ecosystems but the functioning of this ecosystem service is threatened by a worldwide decline of pollinators. Key factors in this situation include the spread and interspecific transmission of pathogens worldwide through the movement of managed pollinators. Research on this fi...

The taxonomic status of Bombus terrestris subspecies is complex and has deep implications in the management of commercial bumblebees for crop pollination as well as in the establishment of appropriate conservation plans. Herein, the complete mitogenome of the endemic Canary Islands subspecies Bombus terrestris canariensis is newly sequenced and com...

Island ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to the introduction of exotic species that can have an impact on local fauna and flora. Here, the carpenter bee Xylocopa pubescens is reported in Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain) for the first time. This species is native to North Africa and the Near East and shows a rapid dispersion across the city...

Migratory beekeeping is a widely extended practice aimed at increasing the yield of products and pollination services of honey bee colonies. However, it represents a stress factor, as it facilitates the dissemination of diseases and may compromise the genetic identity of the colonies involved. To analyze the extent of these effects, pathogens infes...

Supplementary Material of Andújar et al. (2014), published in Mol. Ecol.

A commented checklist of the tachinid species inhabiting the Canary Islands (Spain) is provided, with special emphasis on hosts species and floral resources. Nine new local records are provided and Cylindromyia rufipes is reported for the first time for the Canary Islands, thus increasing the species number to 52. Zoogeographic analysis of the area...

Species identification with DNA barcodes has been proven to be effective on different organisms and, particularly, has become a routinely used and quite accurate tool in forensic entomology to study necrophagous Diptera species. In this study, we analysed 215 specimens belonging to 42 species of 17 genera, from 9 different Diptera families. Flies w...

Report of the catches made by the European bee determination training (COST Super-B Project) in the Calanques National Park.

Geometric morphometrics and molecular methods are effective tools to study the variability of stingless bee populations and species that merit protection given their worldwide decline. Based on previous evidence of cryptic lineages within the Scaptotrigona genus, we tested the existence of multiple evolutionary lineages within the species S. mexica...

Accelerating taxonomic knowledge and making accurate species identifications are critically important given the current biodiversity crisis, particularly in biodiversity hotspots such as Mesoamerica. Objective species delimitation that reduces investigator-driven bias is fundamental to the establishment of appropriate conservation strategies, above...

Stingless bees (Apidae: Meliponini) are one of the most diverse and abundant group of pollinators in the Neotropics, playing a fundamental role in tropical ecosystems. The biodiversity of the group is high in certain regions, such as the tropical Andes. However, there is still uncertainty about the species richness of these bees in Ecuador. In this...

It has been actualized the inventory of species of the family Carabidae occurring in the Balearic Islands, by joining records of samplings carried out by the Department of Zoology of Nurcia, the collection of Prof. Eduard Petitpierre, and the collection of IMEDEA. Total number of species for the Archipelago is 228, Majorca with Cabrera harbor 190 s...

It has been actualized the inventory of species of the family Carabidae occurring in the Balearic Islands, by joining records of samplings carried out by the Department of Zoology of Murcia, the collection of Prof. Eduard Petitpierre, and the collection of the IMEDEA. Total number of species for the Archipelago is 228; Majorca with Cabrera harbor 1...

To understand the effects of global warming in tropical insect communities, it is necessary to comprehend how such communities respond to different abiotic factors that covariate with altitude. In this study, we partially answer this question applied to dung beetle communities distributed along an altitudinal gradient. The sampling was conducted in...

The internal transcribed spacers of the ribosomal RNA gene have been recently proposed as an appropriate marker for genetic analysis of the molecular variation of stingless bees. Herein we report the characterization of the complete ITS1 region in two populations (from Mexico and Guatemala) of the endangered Melipona yucatanica Camargo, Moure and R...

In species differentiation, characters may not diverge synchronously, and there are also processes that shuffle character states in lineages descendant from a common ancestor. Species are thus expected to show some degree of incongruence among characters, and therefore taxonomic delimitation can benefit from integrative approaches and objective str...

Presence of nuclear copies of mitochondrial origin (NUMTs) in two related species of stingless bee genus Melipona (Hymenoptera: Meliponini) Abstract Transferred copies of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) into the nuclear genome (numts) have been reported in several Hymenoptera species, even at a high density in the honey bee nuclear genome. The accidental...

Aim To investigate the effects of Pleistocene climatic variations on the diversification rate of the subgenus Calathus (Coleoptera: Carabidae), and to estimate the role of vicariance and dispersal for explaining current distributional patterns. Location Western Palaearctic Region, particularly the Mediterranean Basin. Methods Fragments of the mitoc...

The stingless bee genus Scaptotrigona is widely distributed across tropical Mexico and includes economically important species used in stingless beekeeping. As Scaptotrigona colonies are currently or potentially translocated across regions, it is important to analyze the extent of genetic diversity from different populations. Herein, every analyzed...

A molecular phylogeny of the subtribe Calathina was inferred from DNA sequence data from the mitochondrial cox1-cox2 region and the nuclear genes 28S and EF-1alpha. All lineages within Calathina from the Holarctic region were represented except for the monotypic subgenus Tachalus. Maximum Parsimony and Bayesian analyses of the combined data set sho...

A phylogenetic analysis of 6.4 kb of nucleotide sequence data from seven genes (mitochondrial cox1-cox2 and tRNA(leu), and nuclear Ef-1alpha C0, Ef-1alpha C1, 28S, and 18S) was done to reconstruct the phylogenetic relationships of the ground-beetle tribe Sphodrini. Gene regions of variable nucleotide length were aligned using both a secondary struc...

J. 2006: Molecular phylogeny and systematics of Calathus Bonelli (Coleoptera: Carabidae: Sphodrini) based on mitochondrial cox1–cox2 sequences. — Entomol. Fennica 17: 214–220. The current subgeneric taxonomy of the genus Calathus is revised according to cox1–cox2 mitochondrial sequences of 44 species representing six subgenera. The subgenus Calathu...