First record of the family Liopteridae (Hymenoptera: Cynipoidea) from India

Abstract

Family Liopteridae is an archaic group of parasitic wasps (Buffington et al., 2020). Together with Austrocynipidae and Ibaliidae, they form the paraphyletic basal lineage of Cynipoidea (Ronquist, 1995a). Liopteridae is widespread in all zoogeographical regions, but most diverse in the tropics and subtropics (Liu et al., 2007). There are about 200 species in four subfamilies: Liopterinae, Oberthuerellinae, Dallatorrellinae, and Mayrellinae (Dong et al., 2018; van Noort, 2020). As a result of the studies on the diversity of parasitoid wasps of the Great Nicobar Island, a single specimen of the family Liopteridae was caught by authors and is hereby reported from India for the first time. This specimen is described and illustrated in the present paper.