Cecidosidae is a family of primitive

monotrysia The Monotrysia are a group of moths in the lepidopteran order, not currently considered to be a natural group or clade. Apart from the recently discovered family Family (from la, familia) is a group of people related either by consanguinit ...

n moths in the order

Lepidoptera Lepidoptera ( ) is an order of insects that includes butterflies and moths (both are called lepidopterans). About 180,000 species of the Lepidoptera are described, in 126 families and 46 superfamilies, 10 percent of the total described speci ...

which have a piercing ovipositor used for laying eggs in plant tissue in which they induce

galls Galls (from the Latin , 'oak-apple') or ''cecidia'' (from the Greek , anything gushing out) are a kind of swelling growth on the external tissues of plants, fungi, or animals. Plant galls are abnormal outgrowths of plant tissues, similar to ...

, or they mine in bark (Davis, 1999; Hoare and Dugdale, 2003). Nine species occur in southern

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

, five species in

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sou ...

(Parra, 1998) and ''Xanadoses nielseni'' was recently described from

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island coun ...

(Hoare and Dugdale, 2003). Some minute

parasitoid In evolutionary ecology, a parasitoid is an organism that lives in close association with its host (biology), host at the host's expense, eventually resulting in the death of the host. Parasitoidism is one of six major evolutionarily stable str ...

wasps are known (Burks ''et al.'', 2005).

References

*Burks, R.A. Gibson, G.A.P. and La Salle, J. (2005). Nomenclatural changes in Neotropical Eulophidae, Eupelmidae and Torymidae (Hymenoptera: Chalcidoidea) relating to parasitoids of ''Cecidoses eremita'' (Lepidoptera: Cecidosidae). ''Zootaxa'', 1082: 45–5
pdf
*Davis, D.R. (1999). The Monotrysian Heteroneura. Ch. 6, pp. 65–90 in Kristensen, N.P. (Ed.). ''Lepidoptera, Moths and Butterflies''. Volume 1: Evolution, Systematics, and Biogeography. Handbuch der Zoologie. Eine Naturgeschichte der Stämme des Tierreiches / Handbook of Zoology. A Natural History of the phyla of the Animal Kingdom. Band / Volume IV Arthropoda: Insecta Teilband / Part 35: 491 pp. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York. *Hoare, R.J.B. and Dugdale, J.S. (2003). Description of the New Zealand incurvarioid ''Xanadoses nielseni'', gen. nov., sp. nov. and placement in Cecidosidae (Lepidoptera). ''Invertebrate Systematics'', 17(1): 47–57. *Parra, L.E. (1998). A redescription of ''Cecidoses argentinana'' (Cecidosidae) and its early stages, with comments on its taxonomic position. ''Nota Lepidopterologica'', 21(3): 206–214.

External links

Tree of LifeAvailable generic names from Natural History Museum Lepidoptera genus database
Moth families Taxa named by Juan Brèthes {{Incurvarioidea-stub