Mining biodiversity databases establishes a global baseline of cosmopolitan Insecta mOTUs: a case study on Platygastroidea (Hymenoptera) with consequences for biological control programs

In the past decade, several platygastroid biological control agents were found to be adventive in North America and Europe while under evaluation in quarantine. The scope and relative risk of this phenomenon is not fully known, but it is clearly a trend with implications for classical biological control. As a means of assessing the issue, and providing a global baseline, we implemented a data-mining approach with DNA sequences in the Barcode of Life Database, which yielded 201 platygastroid BINs with intercontinental and island distributions. At least fifty-five BINs displayed exact COI barcode matches across continents, with many more BINs being inconclusive due to sequence length variation. These intercontinental and island BINs include biocontrol agents known to be adventive and many species identified only to genus. We provide 2,500 identifications for platygastroid BOLD BINs, 88% to genus, to encourage additional research on this distributional phenomenon. The intercontinental BOLD BINs were compared to literature records and GBIF occurrences of cosmopolitan species to identify gaps and discordance across data sources. A small COI barcode dataset from localities in Florida and Germany, including topotypical specimens, revealed more intercontinental matches. To assess the scale of intercontinental distributions for host taxa, and to examine the scale for a broader range of taxa, we analyzed COI sequences in BOLD for the entirety of Insecta. The discovery that adventive parasitoids are following their invasive hosts has important implications for biosecurity and biological control and may lead to an increased emphasis on early detection.