Long-horned Beetles (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) and Tortoise Beetles (Chrysomelidae: Cassidinae) of Tripura, northeastern India with some new additions

B.K. Agarwala ¹ & Partha Pratim Bhattacharjee²

^1,2 Ecology and Biodiversity Laboratories, Department of Zoology, Tripura University, Suryamaninagar, Tripura 799022, India

Email: ¹ bagarwala00@gmail.com (corresponding author), ² bhattacharjee.pp1977@gmail.com

Date of publication (online): 26 October 2012

Date of publication (print): 26 October 2012

ISSN 0974-7907 (online) | 0974-7893 (print)

Editor:Anonymity requested

Manuscript details:

Ms # o2951

Received 19 September 2011

Final received 18 April 2012

Finally accepted 25 August 2012

Citation: Agarwala, B.K. & P.P. Bhattacharjee (2012). Long-horned Beetles (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) and Tortoise Beetles (Chrysomelidae: Cassidinae) of Tripura, northeastern India with some new additions. Journal of Threatened Taxa 4(13): 3223–3227.

Copyright: © B.K. Agarwala & Partha Pratim Bhattacharjee 2012. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. JoTT allows unrestricted use of this article in any medium for non-profit purposes, reproduction and distribution by providing adequate credit to the authors and the source of publication.

Acknowledgements:Authors are thankful to ICAR, New Delhi for financial support through National Project on Insect Biosystematics and to Dr. V.V. Ramamurthy, Indian Agriculture Research Institute, New Delhi for encouragements. We also wish to express our gratitude to Dr. H.V. Ghate, Department of Zoology, Modern College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Pune for identifying / confirming some of the species reported here.

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Members of the family Cerambycidae are commonly known as Longicorn or Long-horned Beetles. This family includes a vast assemblage of phytophagous and xylophagous insects. This is one of the largest families of Coleopteraand contains more than 35,000 species under 4,000 genera in 11 subfamilies (Lawrence 1982). The family, though predominant in tropics, is distributed throughout the world. The number of cerambycidspecies recorded from India is about 1500 (Beeson 1941; Breuning1960–62, 1963a, 1963b, 1964, 1965, 1966) including 13 species reported from Tripura (Mukhopadhyay & Biswas2002). Several new species have been described since the above studies, and many are being documented in Indian territory for the first time (e.g. Ghate et al. 2006, 2011) and so the number of cerambycid species found in India may have changed.

Members of the subfamily Cassidinae (Chrysomelidae) are popularly known as Tortoise Beetles. There are 2,760 species of tortoise beetles known in the world so far (Borowiec 1999) including 450 species recorded from India and four species from Tripura (Basu 2002). Jacoby (1908), Maulik(1919, 1926), Scherer (1969), Takizawa (1980), Borowiec& Takizawa (1991) and Borowiec (1999) have produced monographic works on Indian Chrysomelidae, including tortoise beetles. In this communication, 11 species of Cerambycidae and seven species of Cassidinae beetles are reported as new records from the state of Tripura in India.

Study site

Tripura, one of the border states of northeastern India, lies between 22⁰55’–24⁰32’N & 91⁰21’–92⁰16’E. The state has an area of 10,492km²with 53.62% of area under forest cover. Landscape of the state comprise of low hills covered with moist deciduous forests dominated by Shorea andTectona trees with thick understorey, undulating hillocks covered with secondary forests dominated by Dipterocarpus trees and bushes, and agricultural plains dominated by paddy crop with rain-fed rivers and patches of plantation crops (jute, tea, rubber) and fruit trees (pineapples, mango, cashew nuts and jackfruits) (Chakraborty 1989, 2003). Thus, the landscape of Tripura is very heterogeneous which provides edge effects and diverse habitat types for flora and fauna.

Methods

Collections were made during January 2007–December 2010 by frequent visits to forested and cultivated habitats in different parts of the state. Collected specimens were identified to species level following key characters provided by Gahan (1906), Maulik (1919, 1926), Cherepanov(1990), Mukhopadhyay & Biswas(2000), Basu (2002) and Mukhopadhyay& Halder (2004) and also by comparison with the identified materials available in the ecology and biodiversity laboratories, Department of Zoology, Tripura University where voucher specimens of species reported here are kept.

Discussion

In the present study, 19 species of Cerambycidae belonging to three subfamilies were recorded. The subfamily Lamiinae is found to be dominant with 11 species, followed by Cerambycinaewith seven species, and one species belonged to the subfamily Prioninae. Eleven of these species are reported here for the first time from Tripura (Table 1, Images 1–12). In case of tortoise beetles, eight species were recorded, of which seven species are reported as new records from Tripura (Table 2, Images 13–20). Considering the lack of studies on the Cerambycidae and Cassidinae insect biodiversity in this region, the findings are very significant for the understanding of insect biodiversity in Tripura State and providing baseline data.

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