Preliminary cladistic analysis for the Scotaenini (Hymenoptera: Tiphiidae, Thynninae) genera

Tiphiidae is a cosmopolitan and diverse family of parasitoid wasps with about 2,000 species and 120 genera. Little is known about taxonomy and phylogenetic relationships, especially of Neotropical groups. Scotaenini is a tribe in the Thynninae and includes seven genera. This work tests the monophyly of Scotaenini, a Thynninae tribe and addresses intergeneric relationships. A morphological study was performed for six genera and 30 Scotaenini terminal taxa. Outgroups included three genera, 12 terminal taxa representing the tribes Elaphropterini and Rhagigasterini. A data matrix with 44 characters was used to search for the most parsimony trees using TNT 1.1 software with 10,000 trees retained by the New Search Technology tree-search and the combination of four algorithms. Five trees were retained  and the consensus tree with length = 260, CI = 0.273 and RI= 0.579. From the implied analysis run in the same software, with K=7.18, six trees were retained. Monophyly of Scotaenini was recovered, however the Scotaenini genera were not monophyletic in both analysis. The study of South American Thynninae has shown that the classification established until now for this group needs to be reviewed in different levels and a morphological study including other taxa out of Scotaenini can corroborate to understand the evolution of some characters.  The taxonomy of South American Thynninae wasps has suffered many changes in the last years, with description of new species or synonymies regardless of phylogenetic relationships, and probably many of these current genera are not natural groups, which demonstrates the necessity to improve and review the taxonomy of South American Thynninae.