Michael J. Raupach

• PD Dr.
• Curator at Zoologische Staatssammlung München

The correct classification of organisms based on specific rules is essential in biological sciences. Traditionally, morphological characteristics such as size, shape, color, and anatomical structures have been used to identify and classify species. However, as consequence of the tremendous advances in molecular technologies during the last years, n...

With about 5,000 species worldwide, the Heteroptera or true bugs are the most diverse taxon among the hemimetabolous insects in aquatic and semi-aquatic ecosystems. Species may be found in almost every freshwater environment and have very specific habitat requirements, making them excellent bioindicator organisms for water quality. However, a corre...

The Carabidae is by far the largest family of the Adephaga, with more than 40,000 described species. Whereas their phylogeny has been extensively studied, convergences and reversals in morphological traits prevent a robust phylogenetic concept so far. In this study, we sequenced the complete mitochondrial genomes of Notiophilus quadripunctatus (Neb...

The Pleidae, or pygmy backswimmers, is a family of aquatic bugs (Hemiptera, Heteroptera, Nepomorpha) containing four genera. Here, we describe Plea cryptica sp. nov. and redescribe its sister species, Plea minutissima Leach, 1817. Whereas the morphological distinction of these closely related species is only possible for males, molecular data clear...

Gerromorpha Popov, 1971 is a fascinating and diverse insect lineage that evolved about 200 Mya to spend their entire life cycle on the air-water interface and have since colonized all types of aquatic habitats. The sub-family Halobatinae Bianchi, 1896 is particularly interesting because some species have adapted to life on the open ocean-a habitat...

During the last years, DNA barcoding has become the most popular approach in molecular species identification. Within the framework of the establishment of a comprehensive sequence library for the ground beetles of Germany, DNA barcodes have already been generated for numerous species in the past. However, barcodes for several rare and/or threatene...

Nachrichtenblatt der bayerischen Entomologen 74 (1/2): 30-44 In May 2022, Peter Wiprächtiger`s collection of water bugs and water striders from Switzerland was handed over to the Zoological State Collection Munich. Since the level of knowledge about these groups of animals in Switzerland is quite low, the processing of the collection material was...

Entomologische Zeitschrift · Schwanfeld · 134 (4) 2024. Beetles were caught and identified in a small garden in the Ammerland region of Lower Saxony for five years (2019 to 2023). A total of 931 beetles and 137 species were identified. With 23 species and 233 beetles found, weevils were dominating in species and individuals. The most abundant beet...

The mitochondrial genome of Metazoa is predominantly maternally inherited, providing a valuable genetic marker in various fields such as phylogenetics and phylogeography. However, mitochondrial heteroplasmy, where multiple copies of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) coexist within an individual or even cell, presents a challenge to the use of mtDNA markers...

Bräu, M., Dorow, W.H.O., Achtziger, R., Aukema, B., Brandner, J., Frieß, T., Göricke, P., Goßner, M., Hartung, V., Heckmann, R., Hoffmann, H.-J., König, M., Münch, M., Puzoń, S., Rabitsch, W., Raupach, M., Simon, H., Voigt, K., & Winkelmann, H. (2024): Exkursions-ergebnisse des 49. Treffens der Arbeitsgemeinschaft mitteleuropäischer Heteropterologe...

Hymenoptera has some of the highest diversity and number of individuals among insects. Many of these species potentially play key roles as food sources, pest controllers and pollinators. However, little is known about the diversity and biology and ~80% of the species have not yet been described. Classical taxonomy based on morphology is a rather sl...

Substantial parts of the European and German insect fauna still remain largely unexplored, the so-called “dark taxa”. In particular, midges (Diptera) and parasitoid wasps (Hymenoptera) are abundant and species-rich throughout Europe, yet are often neglected in biodiversity research. One such dark taxon is Microgastrinae wasps (Hymenoptera: Braconid...

Hymenoptera have some of the highest diversity and number of individuals among insects. Many of these species potentially play key roles as food sources, pest controllers, and pollinators. However, little is known about their diversity and biology, and about 80% of the species have not been described yet. Classical taxonomy based on morphology is a...

Heteroptera records collected on the occasion of the 47th meeting of the “Working Group of Central European Heteropterologists” in the province of Bolzano/Bozen, South Tyrol, Italy, are reported. A total of 242 species were observed during the three official field days. Including the findings of the individual excursions of single participants a to...

Theodor Hartig’s aphid and scale insect type specimens have been presumed lost or destroyed for the last 140 years. Here we document their discovery at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology (Zoologische Staatssammlung München, ZSM), in Munich, Germany. These specimens include primary types for 24 aphid, three adelgid, and two armored scale insec...

Identification and Ecology of Freshwater Arthropods in the Mediterranean Basin covers the entire Mediterranean basin, including parts of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Mediterranean islands, but excluding other biogeographic locations with Mediterranean climates located outside the region. The book provides an extensive description of the taxonomy an...

Zusammenfassung: In den letzten Jahren hat sich das DNA-Barcoding als gängiges Verfahren in der molekularen Artidentifikation etabliert. In diesem Zusammenhang konnten Hinweise für eine bislang übersehene Wasserwanzenart innerhalb der Zwergrückenschwimmer (Pleidae) in Deutschland gefunden werden. Bislang war nur eine Art für Deutschland und Europa...

A total of 173 species is documented, including Phytocoris intricatus Flor, 1861 and Saldula palustris (Douglas, 1874), which are first records for Carinthia. In addition, 124 species were recorded the first time for the National Park and 39 species of a red list category in the Red List of Carinthia are documented. The true bug fauna of the study...

DNA barcoding has become the most popular approach for species identification in recent years. As part of the German Barcode of Life project, the first DNA barcode library for terrestrial and freshwater isopods from Germany is presented. The analyzed barcode library included 38 terrestrial (78% of the documented species of Germany) and five freshwa...

Simple Summary Roughly two-thirds of the insect species described from Germany belong to the orders Diptera (flies) or Hymenoptera (wasps, bees, ants and sawflies). However, both orders contain several species-rich families that have received little taxonomic attention until now. This study takes the first step in assessing these “dark taxa” famili...

In a garden of a small town in Lower Saxony the beetle fauna was recorded by a young entomologist (born in 2009) together with her father in 2020. We found 172 beetles in total, which represent 37 species. With 71 beetles, which were distributed in 16 species, most of them were detected in May. The most abundant beetle species in the course of the...

531 genetic clusters (BINs) of gall midges were retrieved in a single Malaise trap that was set up in 2017 within the inner-city premises of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich, Germany. Although the sample obtained from this trap is very limited in time and space, the number of detected BINs correspond to 63.5 % of the number of Cec...

Cryptic species are a common phenomenon in cosmopolitan marine species. The use of molecular tools has often uncovered cryptic species occupying a fraction of the geographic range of the original morphospecies. Ship-worms (Teredinidae) are marine bivalves, living in drift and fixed wood, many of which have a conserved morphology across cosmopolitan...

Simple Summary The extant distribution of many plants and animals is the result of the dynamics of the last ice ages with their recurrent advances and retreats of the northern ice sheet and the glaciers in the mountains. The arctic-alpine distribution is a special case where a species occurs in the subarctic/arctic regions and locally restricted in...

published in Abhandlungen aus dem Westfälischen Museum für Naturkunde 100: 59-149. Abstract: After the fauna and flora of a sand pit near Haltern-Flaesheim (Recklinghausen district, North Rhine-Westphalia) has been summarized for the first time from 2014 to 2019 by a working group of 23 scientists (HANNIG 2020), an update of the data situation bec...

Taxonomy plays a central role in biological sciences. It provides a communication system for scientists as it aims to enable correct identification of the studied organisms. As a consequence, species descriptions should seek to include as much available information as possible at species level to follow an integrative concept of 'taxonomics'. Here,...

Obituary on Dr. Martin Baehr (10.3.1943 – 17.4.2019)

Species of the ground beetle genus Pterostichus Bonelli, 1810 are some of the most common carabids in Europe. This publication provides a first comprehensive DNA barcode library for this genus and allied taxa including Abax Bonelli, 1810, Molops Bonelli, 1810, Poecilus Bonelli, 1810, and Stomis Clairville, 1806 for Germany and Central Europe in gen...

The ground beetle genus Agonum Bonelli, 1810 is a large genus of the tribe Platynini with many species that show high amounts of intraspecific variations, making a correct identification challenging. As part of the German Barcode of Life initiative, this publication provides a comprehensive DNA barcode library for species of Agonum that are reporte...

The common springtail-stalker Notiophilus biguttatus (Fabricius, 1779) and the four-dimpled springtail stalker N. quadripunctatus Dejean, 1826 are two closely related species of ground beetles that can be typically separated by the number of dorsal punctures on each elytra. However, the numbers of these punctures can vary for both species, causing...

The common hermit crab Pagurus bernhardus (Linnaeus, 1758) is an abundant and ecologically important benthic crustacean in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean. While this species has been intensively studied in terms of its ecology, physiology, behavior, and larval development, knowledge about its population structure and demographic history is still l...

The genus Notiophilus Duméril, 1806 is a distinctive taxon of small, diurnal and morphologically similar beetles exhibiting large eyes and widened second elytral intervals. In this study we analysed the effectiveness of DNA barcodes to discriminate 67 specimens that represent 8 species of Notiophilus from Central Europe. Interspecific K2P distances...

Many people, entomologists, and nonprofessional alike, are avid collectors of stamps portraying insects. In this article I review the number of official and published postal stamps featuring ground beetles (Coleoptera: Carabidae) from 1953 to 2017, covering a time period of more than 60 years. Whereas stamps depicting other popular insect taxa, e.g...

The genus Amara Bonelli, 1810 is a very speciose and taxonomically difficult genus of the Carabidae. The identification of many of the species is accomplished with considerable difficulty, in particular for females and immature stages. In this study the effectiveness of DNA barcoding, the most popular method for molecular species identification, wa...

Barcode analysis using the BOLD workbench

Neighbour joining topology

Taxonomy plays a central role in biological sciences. It provides a communication system for scientists as it aims to enable correct identification of the studied organisms. As a consequence, species descriptions should seek to include as much available information as possible at species level to follow an integrative concept of ‘taxonomics’. Here,...

Aligned DNA barcodes of the data set DS-BAHCE Barcoding Aquatic Heteroptera of Central Europe. Accession numbers are requested and will be added in proof.

Neighbor Joining topology of all analyzed aquatic bug specimens based on Kimura 2-parameter distances. Specimens are classified using ID numbers from BOLD and species name. Numbers next to nodes represent non-parametric boot-strap values (1,000 replicates, in %).

Supplemental information.

Screenshot of the complete alignment of all studied aquatic Heteroptera (Gerromorpha, Nepomorpha) showing a gap of 39 nucleotides (13 amino acids) within the analyzed specimens of Cymatia coleoptrata (Fabricius, 1777) from position 110 to 148. Amino acid classification accords to the IUPAC-IUB single-letter amino acid codes. Visualization was perfo...

The Tohoku tsunami of March 2011 ejected a vast amount of debris into the Pacific Ocean. Wood boring shipworms (Bivalvia: Teredinidae) were either already present in, or settled on, the wooden fraction of this debris, offering a unique opportunity to study shipworm diversity in rafted wood of a known origin and time of ocean entry. Lumber and other...

The family Teredinidae (shipworms) contains 70-plus species of boring bivalves specialized to live in and digest wood. Traditional means of species identification and taxonomy of this group encounter numerous challenges, often compounded by the diverse and dynamic nature of shipworm ecology and distribution. Modern integrative taxonomic methods are...

DNA barcode reference library for marine amphipods

DNA barcode reference library for the superorder Peracarida

Accurate identification of fish eggs to species level is a challenging task as many species have similar egg sizes and morphology. The results of egg determination of three economically important fish species are presented by using DNA barcoding in comparison to the classical morphological determination. About 500 fish eggs from the Celtic Sea were...

Background Taxonomic uncertainties in the morphological species identification and taxonomic revisions in individual groups are known for all echinoderm classes. These uncertainties in morphological species identification and discrimination have spawned the application of molecular genetic identification techniques. However, as the fundamental step...

Two species of Atarbolana (Cirolanidae: Isopoda) from the intertidal zone of the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf were studied and redescribed. The known distribution of this small genus is limited to the northern areas of the Indian Ocean, from the Pakistan coasts to the Persian Gulf. The analyses of DNA barcodes as well as detailed morphological...

The Tohoku tsunami of March 2011 ejected a vast amount of debris into the Pacific Ocean. Lumber and other Tohoku-sourced wood began appearing on Eastern and Central Pacific (Hawaii) beaches in 2013 and 2014 respectively. Wood boring mollusks (Teredinidae) settled on this debris, offering a unique opportunity to study shipworm diversity in rafted wo...

A large-scale comprehensive reference library of DNA barcodes for European marine fishes was assembled, allowing the evaluation of taxonomic uncertainties and species genetic diversity that were otherwise hidden in geographically restricted studies. A total of 4118 DNA barcodes were assigned to 358 species generating 366 Barcode Index Numbers (BIN)...

In this study 118 seafood products were analyzed, mainly fish and shrimps, bought from supermarkets and fishmongers in northwest Germany. Various processed products from fresh to canned were analyzed using two different extraction kits, and by amplifying full-length (∼650 bp) as well a mini-length (∼320 bp) barcodes belonging to the cytochrome c ox...

The coherency among larval stages of marine taxa, ocean currents and popula- tion connectivity is still subject to discussion. A common view is that organ- isms with pelagic larval stages have higher dispersal abilities and therefore show a relatively homogeneous population genetic structure. Contrary to this, local genetic differentiation is assum...

As molecular identification method, DNA barcoding based on partial cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (COI) sequences has been proven to be a useful tool for species determination in many insect taxa including ground beetles. In this study we tested the effectiveness of DNA barcodes to discriminate species of the ground beetle genus Bembidion and some...

Neighbor joining topology

Barcode analysis using the BOLD workbench

Larval dispersal and limited knowledge of physical boundaries challenge our understanding of the processes that drive genetic divergence and potential speciation in the marine environment. Divergence, both within and between populations of marine taxa, is not uncommon, but spatial and temporal stability of observed genetic structure is not well kno...

Sequence-based specimen identification, known as DNA barcoding, is a common method complementing traditional morphology-based taxonomic assignments. The fundamental resource in DNA barcoding is the availability of a taxonomically reliable sequence database to use as a reference for sequence comparisons. Here we provide a reference library including...

Species identification represents a pivotal component for large-scale biodiversity studies and conservation planning but represents a challenge for many taxa when using morphological traits only. Consequently, alternative identification methods based on molecular markers have been proposed. In this context, DNA barcoding has become a popular and ac...

A decade of DNA barcoding of crustaceans: input file

The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 ejected a vast amount of debris into the Western Pacific Ocean. Lumber and other Tohoku-sourced wood began appearing on Eastern Pacific beaches in the spring of 2013. Wood boring mollusks of the family Teredinidae settled on this debris, offering a unique opportunity to study North Pacific shipworm di...

In most cases, adult fish can be easily identified based on the analysis of morphological characteristics. In contrast to this, a successful identification of processed specimens or early life cycle stages might be quite challenging. Here we present an in situ hybridization (ISH) approach for reliable species identification. Oligonucleotide probes...

The applications of traditional morphological and molecular methods for species identification are greatly restricted by processing speed and on a regional or greater scale are generally considered unfeasible. In this context, high-throughput sequencing, or metagenetics, has been proposed as an efficient tool to document biodiversity. Here we evalu...

Die Taxonomie erlebt heutzutage tiefgreifende Veränderungen. Molekulare Methoden wie DNA-Barcoding sind mittlerweile fester Bestandteil moderner taxonomischer Forschung. Der aufkommende Einsatz von modernen Hochdurchsatzverfahren wird die Erfassung der Artenvielfalt beschleunigen und das Verständnis für Eigenschaften eines Organismus in einem nie d...

During the last years DNA barcoding has become a popular method of choice for molecular specimen identification. Here we present a comprehensive DNA barcode library of various crustacean taxa found in the North Sea, one of the most extensively studied marine regions of the world. Our data set includes 1,332 barcodes covering 205 species, including...

During the last years, the effectiveness of DNA barcoding for animal species identification has been proven in many studies, analyzing both vertebrate and invertebrate taxa. In terms of marine organisms, however, most barcoding studies typically focus on economically relevant species, for example, fish, as well as on the documentation of hotspots o...

Background: Over the last few years, several comprehensive reference libraries of DNA barcodes for marine fishes of Europe have been published with regional focus, but a global appraisal of the progress of the compilation of a reference library for European marine ichthyiofauna is still missing. Here we assemble for the first time a large-scale com...

Since 1994, Hemigrapsus penicillatus, an Asian brush-clawed shore crab, spreads along Northeast Atlantic coasts. There is evidence that the most recently described and widely accepted sibling species of H. penicillatus, namely Hemigrapsus takanoi, represents the Asian brush-clawed brachyuran crab in Europe. Morphological characteristics are conside...

Nematodes or roundworms represent one of the most diverse and dominant taxon in marine benthic habitats. Whereas a morphological identification of many species is challenging, the application of molecular markers represents a promising approach for species discrimination and identification. In this study, we used an integrative taxonomic approach,...

During the last few years, DNA barcoding has become an efficient method for the identification of species. In the case of insects, most published DNA barcoding studies focus on species of the Ephemeroptera, Trichoptera, Hymenoptera and especially Lepidoptera. In this study we test the efficiency of DNA barcoding for true bugs (Hemiptera: Heteropter...

Cymodoce waegelei sp. nov. is described from the subtidal zone of the Iranian coasts of the Persian Gulf using both morphological and molecular data. C. waegelei sp. nov. is most similar to C. tribullis Harrison & Holdich, 1984 from Australia, Vietnam and Singapore. Analysis of DNA barcodes and nuclear 28S rDNA: D8 expansion segments clearly suppor...

Isopods of the species Ligia oceanica are typical inhabitants of the rocky intertidal of the northern European coastline. The aim of this study was to assess the genetic structure of this species using mitochondrial and nuclear sequence data. We analysed partial mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (CO1) and 16S rRNA gene sequence data of 1...

Species status of Macropodia rostrata and Macropodia parva (Crustacea, Decapoda, Majoidea)

Valid fish species identification is an essential step both for fundamental science and fisheries management. The traditional identification is mainly based on external morphological diagnostic characters, leading to inconsistent results in many cases. Here, we provide a sequence reference library based on mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit...