Lara-Sophie Dey

University of Hamburg | UHH · Centrum für Naturkunde (CeNak) - Entomology

Animal genomes vary widely in size, and much of their architecture and content remains poorly understood. Even among related groups, such as orders of insects, genomes may vary in size by orders of magnitude-for reasons unknown. The largest known insect genomes were repeatedly found in Orthoptera, e.g., Podisma pedestris (1C = 16.93 pg), Stethophym...

Mitochondrial gene order has contributed to the elucidation of evolutionary relationships in several animal groups. It generally has found its application as a phylogenetic marker for deep nodes. Yet, in Orthoptera limited research has been performed on the gene order, although the group represents one of the oldest insect orders. We performed a co...

Isophya modestior (Orthoptera: Tettigoniidae) is a species distributed in central and south-eastern Europe, where its distribution is largely separated by two large rivers (Sava and Danube). Since previous studies on the song and morphology of the stridulatory file across its complete geographic range showed that the species is separated into two m...

Animal genomes vary widely in size, and much of their architecture and content remains poorly understood. Even among related groups, such as orders of insects, genomes may vary in size by orders of magnitude – for reasons unknown. The largest known insect genomes were repeatedly found in Orthoptera, e.g., Podisma pedestris (1C = 16.93 pg), Stethoph...

The genus Thalpomena Saussure, 1884 is distributed in North Africa, Somalia and Ethiopia. It currently contains nine species, including one species with four subspecies; Seven of them (including one with four subspecies) are distributed in the Atlas Mountains, one in Libya and one (originally described in the genus Vosseleria) in the Somali Highlan...

Orthoptera have some of the largest genomes of all insects. At the same time, the architecture of their genomes remains poorly understood. Comparative cytological data across a wide range of taxa, even for basic parameters such as chromosome number, may provide important insights into the evolution of these genomes and help answer the question of w...

The genus Thalpomena Saussure comprises nine species and four subspecies and is largely endemic to the Atlas Mountains (North Africa). Here, we used an evolutionary taxonomic approach to differentiate the species of the genus Thalpomena and to reconstruct their biogeographic history. Phylogenetic tree reconstruction based on five molecular markers...

Distribution of the wood cockroach Ectobius vittiventris (A. Costa, 1847) in Ger-many with a first record for Lower Saxony. A recent find of the amber wood cockroach Ectobius vittiventris from the city of Stelle northwest of Winsen (Luhe) in Lower Saxony led us to research the current distribution of this originally southern European species in nor...

The cormorant Phalacrocorax carbo (Linnaeus, 1758) is a common breeding species at lake areas of Mongolia. Although molecular research has been conducted on many colonies worldwide, no studies of the genetic diversity of Mongolian colonies are known to date. In this study, we sequence for the first time a fragment of cytochrome oxidase 1 (CO1) from...

The Great Cormorant Phalacrocorax carbo is a wide spread breeding species in Mongolia with a progressive population trend. Observations of the Mongolian-German Biological Expeditions were analyzed and summarized with data from literature. About 1,500 young birds were ringed in 2016 and 2017. One important recovery was coming from the wintering area...

The steppe regions of Mongolia have a rich grasshopper fauna. Especially, the short-horned (Caelifera) grasshopper family Acrididae with the subfamilies Gomphocerinae (slant-faced grasshoppers) and Oedipodinae (band-winged grasshoppers) show a high diversity and abundance. This study reviews the Mongolian fauna of band-winged grasshoppers based on...

The Orthoptera fauna of Pevestorf (Lüchow-Dannenberg, Lower Saxony) and its surrounding based on records over more than 10 years. In this paper, we describe the grasshopper fauna of the region around the village of Pevestorf, district of Lüchow-Dannenberg (Lower Saxony) based on field trip material collected from 2008 to 2019 (8,374 specimens, 6,14...

Human-induced ecological and climatic changes have led to the decline and even local extinction of many formerly widely distributed temperate and cold-adapted species. Determining the exact causes of this decline remains difficult. Bryodemella tuberculata was a widely distributed orthopteran species before the mid-19th century. Since then, many Eur...

Grasshoppers, specifically those of the family Acrididae are known to have the largest genomes of all insects. However, less than 100 species of Orthoptera have their genome size estimated so far. In the present study, we measured the genome size of five acridid species belonging to the two subfamilies Oedipodinae and Gomphocerinae. All of the geno...

With more than 143 species and a wide distributional range, the genus Sphingono-tus FIEBER, 1852 is the most species-rich genus within the subfamily Oedipodinae. Because of the high morphological similarity of many species, and a lack of comprehensive identification keys, it is not easy to distinguish many species of the genus. Molecular methods, s...

Sphingonotus (Sphingonotus) rubescens (Walker, 1870) occurs from the Atlantic Islands to central and southern Asia, but its ecological preferences and the potential drivers that shaped its currently extensive distribution remain unknown. We review the known occurrence data for S. rubescens and reconstruct its current and palaeoclimatic niche (Last...

The yellow-legged, or Asian hornet, Vespa velutina, has invaded large parts of SouthWestern Europe and now starts spreading further north. Recently, it has been reported from Hamburg, Northern Germany. Yet, the origin of this new invasion is not clear as the founders may have come either from Southern Europe or from Asia. We here use COI sequences...

Types represent the ultimate taxonomic information of a species and hence represent the most important specimens in museums. The entomological collections of the Zoological Museum Hamburg (now part of the Centrum für Naturkunde) hold several thousand primary types of insects. However, despite their importance currently no type database exists and c...

DNA barcoding represents an objective tool for fast species identification, especially for taxa for which morphological identification is difficult. One current limitation of barcoding is the lack of reference sequences for many groups. While many European and North American countries have started their own barcoding initiatives to generate complet...

Zoological collections remain the main archive of animal life on earth, especially in times of mass extinctions. The most important animals of these collections are the type specimens, which represent the original reference for a species. While a full digitization of most museum collections currently remains utopic, lists of types are an essential...

Sphingonotus is a species-rich genus of band-winged grasshoppers (Oedipodinae), comprising more than 170 species, with its diversity hotspots in the Mediterranean, and in Central and Eastern Asia. Iran represents one of the countries with the highest species diversity for the genus with a total of 31 recorded species. However, no study so far has p...