Anadenanthera colubrina (Fabaceae) logs in the Atlantic Forest biome: first

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Wood-boring beetles develop in live trees and dead wood, performing ecological services such as decomposition and regulation of forest resources. Species of the Cerambycidae family, widely distributed in the world, bore into the trunks of trees and dead wood in native and cultivated areas. The objective is to report the first host plant for Thoracibidion lineatocolle (Thomson, 1865) (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) and a new host plant for Temnopis megacephala (Germar, 1824) (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest biome. Three logs, with one-meter-long by 20 cm in diameter, were cut from the trunk of a healthy Anadenanthera colubrina (Fabaceae) tree in October 2013 and tied in the understory at 1.5m high in the Rio Doce State Park, Minas Gerais State, Brazil. The logs, exposed in the forest, were each removed after 40, 80 and 120 days and stored individually in a cardboard box in the “Laboratório de Campo do Projeto de Ecologia de Longa Duração (PELD-CNPq)” in the Rio Doce State Park. A total of 94 individuals of T. lineatocolle and 228 of T. megacephala emerged from the A. colubrina logs. This is the first report of a host plant for T. lineatocolle and a new host plant for T. megacephala.


Anadenanthera colubrina (Fabaceae) logs in the Atlantic
Anadenanthera colubrina (Vell.) Brenan (Fabaceae), pioneer to initial secondary tree in dry tropical forests, occurs in Argentina and Brazil, with heights of up to 30 meters and more than 23 cm in diameter (Carvalho, 2002;Nunes et al., 2007). The A. colubrina wood is suitable for charcoal production, fences, firewood, houses, and the handicraft manufacturing, mainly in rural communities (Monteiro et al., 2006).
The objective is to report the first host plant for Thoracibidion lineatocolle (Thomson, 1865) (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) and a new host plant for Temnopis megacephala (Germar, 1824) in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest biome.
The study was carried out in the Rio Doce State Park, an Atlantic Forest remnant in the Minas Gerais State, southeast Brazil (19° 46' 48.36" S and 42° 36' 02.93" W) (Carvalho and Ribeiro, 2018). The area has 36,000 ha with 44 natural lakes and, predominantly, composed of semidecidual forest (Costa e Silva, 2001;Fonseca-Silva et al., 2015). This area has a tropical humid mesothermic climate, with well-defined dry and rainy seasons (Antunes, 1986).
A healthy Anadenanthera colubrina (Fabaceae) tree was cut down and three logs with one-meter-long by 20 cm in diameter were cut from its trunk in October 2013 (rainy season) in a secondary forest area of the Rio Doce State Park, Atlantic Forest biome, Brazil. The logs were tied with light spinning as a rope and placed in the forest understory at 1.5 m from the ground. The logs were removed from the forest after 40, 80 and 120 days (one each time) and stored in an individual cardboard box in the field laboratory. Each cardboard box had two transparent plastic jars, with one on each side, as a source of light to attract adults that emerged from the wood. These boxes were opened monthly, when the adult beetles were collected and the logs were wetted and placed back into the boxes. Inspections were carried out on each log until February 2015, when all boxes were opened and the material was discarded.
A total of 94 and 228 individuals of T. lineatocolle and T. megacephala, respectively, was collected (Figure 1), with distinct temporal distribution (Table 1). The wood-boring beetle succession in the logs can explain this temporal colonization pattern, since certain species depends on previous colonization by others to invade the log (Calderón-Cortés et al., 2011; Victorsson, 2012).
The occurrence of T. lineatocolle in A. colubrina logs represents the first record of a host plant for this beetle. Thoracibidion lineatocolle occurs in Argentina, Brazil (Bahia, Espírito Santo, Maranhão, Minas Gerais, Paraná, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and São Paulo States) and Paraguay (Monné, 2019).
The knowledge about T. lineatocolle and T. megacephala life history is scarce, since the studies focus mainly on passive collections, with light (Nascimento et al., 2017;Corrêa et al., 2020) and malaise (Guedes et al., 2019) traps, wood colonization (Di Iorio, 1994;Corrêa et al., 2020) reviewing material deposited in the museums (Martins, 1971). Consequently, more studies are needed to better understand the life history of these species.  The record of Thoracibidion lineatocolle and Temnopis megacephala in fresh-cut Anadenanthera colubrina logs, presented here, expands the knowledge of the life history for these boring insects, with new host tree information.