First assessment of the biodiversity of praying mantises (Insecta: Mantodea) in Cameroon with DNA barcoding

(Fig 3) was rooted at Achlaena grandis, as according to recent multilocus analysis [41] family Chroicopteridae, to which A. grandis belongs, is the sister to all taxa in our sampling. Bootstrap supports are given in percent. Maximum likelihood based pairwise distances for all sequences used are presented in S2 Table. The branches of resulting tree are grouping in accordance with current taxonomy of order [33] in almost all of the cases. Our samples of Dactylopterygidae, Hymenopodidae, Miomanti- nae, Omomantinae, Tenoderinae, and Tarachodinae are distinctly associated with sequences from CAR and Gabon, while Congoharpax aberrans (Galinthiadidae) is nested within Teno- derinae (Mantidae) on its own long branch. Popinae clustered together, however, several sam- ples of Hapalomantinae were also introduced. Same happened in Amorphoscelinae, where Bolivaroscelis carinata (Amorphoscelinae) is grouped with Negromantis (Hapalomantinae). The situation with split Hapalomantinae likely would be resolved with inclusion of nuclear markers in future phylogenetic analysis. Fig 3. Maximum likelihood tree built using available (n = 165) barcodes of Mantodea of Central African subregion. The number on top of the line is ultrafast bootstrap, two on the bottom are SH-aLRT/aBayes. Barcodes generated during this study are shown in bold. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0304163.g003 PLOS ONE Diversity of praying mantises in Cameroon PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0304163 May 23, 2024 18 / 23