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Larval morphology, phylogeography and automatic identification of chosen flower chafer beetles (Scarabaeidae: Cetoniinae)
Vondráček, Dominik ; Šípek, Petr (advisor) ; Bezděk, Aleš (referee) ; Kundrata, Robin (referee)
Currently, over 4.300 species of flower chafer beetles (Scarabaeidae: Cetoniinae) are described in more than 485 genera, with the number of genera, species and subspecies increasing by dozens of new taxa each year. Especially in the past, some of the species descriptions were relatively vague and short operating only with the coloration of beetles, or with extremely subtle differences on the male genitalia without any support of other data and analyses. In this dissertation, I focused on the use of various data and methodological approaches that can help understand the evolutionary processes within this group and its complicated taxonomy and systematics, which is also still very unstable even at higher taxonomic ranks. In two works we studied the morphology of immature stages of flower chafers and their bionomy. In the case of the Taenioderini tribe, whose immature stages were not known until then, we found surprisingly significant morphological variability in the eight described species, which is unusual in larval stages of flower chafers. In the second work, we focused on the genus Oxythyrea. We described the larvae of nine of the ten currently known species and confronted the obtained data with the already existing descriptions of the larvae of the Leucocelina subtribe, to which the studied...
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