Abstract
A new species belonging to the genus Ooencyrtus Ashmead is described. Ooencyrtus marcelloi sp. nov. has been reared from eggs of Heliconiini (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae, Heliconiinae) collected in Panama on Passiflora spp. The new species is compared with its closest Ooencyrtus species, i.e. O. caligo Noyes, O. neustriae Mercet, O. flavipes (Timberlake), O. camerounensis (Risbec), O. endymion Huang and Noyes and Ooencyrtus sp. “undet. C.” (from India). This represents the second record of Ooencyrtus from Heliconinae and the first record of this genus from Panama.
Acknowledgements
All wasp material was collected from February to April 2008 using permit no. SE/AP-3-08 and exported using permit nos. SEX/A-19-08 and SEX/A-32-08. Permits were provided by the Autoridad Nacional del Ambiente (ANAM) of Panama which is here deeply thanked by the authors. We are also grateful to Chris Jiggins for supporting the field survey and Yde Jongema for his help in the early stages of wasp identifications. This work was supported financially by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research/Earth and Life Sciences (NWO/ALW) VENI grant 86305020 (M.E. Huigens), the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) short-term fellowship (J.B. Woelke) and the Section of Integrative Biology of the University of Texas travel grant (C. Estrada).