Discrimination of the Three Aphrophora Species: Linear Morphometric and 2D-Geometric Morphometric Approach

Abstract

In the present study, we compared three Aphrophora species using both linear and geometric morphometrics. According to the One-way ANOVA test, it was significantly indicated that the average rates of the linear measurements of the morphological characters in Aphrophora alni, Aphrophora geruzei, and Aphrophora salicina are different from each other. The jackknife rate in each species is more than 95%. Although the average measurements of the linear measurements show significant differences from each other, the minimum-maximum ranges of all characters were seen to overlap among the species. However, in geometric morphometric analyses, Procrustes ANOVA showed that whole body, head, pronotum, mesonotum size (as centroid size, CS) and shape differed significantly among the species. The species A. alni, A. salicina and A. geruzei differ from each other in canonical variates analysis and discriminant function analysis. Cross-validation rates among the three species were higher than 70%. The lowest cross-validation rate was indicated in the mesonotum. As a result of the the CS analysis, sexual differences for the complete body, significant differences were indicated for each of the species. However, in terms of shape, sexual dimorphism was only found in A. salicina for shape. In all three species, female individuals were larger in centroid size than male individuals. The geometric morphometric method is considered as an effective method for identifying new species in entomological studies. Aphrophora geruzei, identified as a new species from T & uuml;rkiye based on morphological data, was distinguished from the other two commonly seen Aphrophora species in T & uuml;rkiye by differences in the dorsal views of pronotum, mesonotum, and head, supported by geometric morphometric analysis.