Tetrigidae of Ethiopia: first DNA barcoding and description of three new species

Tetrigidae is a caeliferan family of Orthoptera constituting a diverse and relatively ancient lineage of small Orthopterans, which are at their highest diversity in tropical and subtropical areas. However, so far, no studies have been conducted on the identification and description of Tetrigidae species in Ethiopia, and even less molecular data is available. Hence, we performed the first DNA barcoding study of species belonging to the genera Paratettix, Leptacrydium, Dasyleurotettix, and Morphopoides from Ethiopia. We provide 35 new sequences of the COI gene belonging to six species of these genera. We show that Ethiopian Tetrigidae can be successfully identified using DNA barcodes, even in cryptic genera such as Paratettix: species delimitation based on this gene was strongly congruent with the morphological assignments. We report the three species Dasyleurotettix infaustus (Walker, 1871), Morphopoides tessmanni Günther, 1939, and M. folipes (Hancock, 1908) from Ethiopia for the first time. In addition, we describe three new species, which are confirmed both with morphological and genetic data: Paratettix tanai sp. nov., Paratettix geminus sp. nov., and Leptacrydium naqamteensis sp. nov. Paratettix macrostenus is considered a new synonym of P. subpustulatus. Future integrative taxonomic studies including more material from diverse regions and more comprehensive taxon sampling need to be performed to understand the diversity of Tetrigidae across Africa.