﻿Catalog of the invertebrate type specimens hosted at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador and Escuela Politécnica Nacional natural history collections

﻿Abstract This work updates the invertebrate type specimen catalog published by Donoso et al. (2009). The catalog is increased by 2281 type specimens (from 454 species or subspecies) to a total of 4180 type specimens (from 770 species or subspecies) hosted at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador and Escuela Politécnica Nacional natural history collections. The new material adds 307 holotypes, 1910 paratypes, and 64 allotypes. It provides original information from four phyla (Arthropoda, Mollusca, Nemata, and Platyhelminthes), eight classes, 21 orders, 73 families, and 156 genera. This updated catalog includes a map showing the type localities in the country, a list of the 71 new type specimens (from 23 species or subspecies) from other countries hosted at both museums, corrections to the previous catalog published by Donoso et al. (2009), and label information from each new specimen.


Introduction
In 2009, we published the first catalog of invertebrate type specimens in the collection at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (QCAZI), the largest in Ecuador (Donoso et al. 2009). The catalog provided information on type specimens in the collection up to the year 2008 and explored general patterns of collection biases associated with this type material. Donoso et al. (2009) found that invertebrate type material was associated with roads near Quito (i.e., the country's capital city with the major international airport). Furthermore, these type specimens were biased towards a few localities not incorporated in the national system of protected areas. Since then, several hundred specimens have accumulated in the QCAZI collection.
The museum at Escuela Politécnica Nacional (MEPN), in Quito, Ecuador, was created in 1946 by the naturalist Gustavo Orcés and manages invertebrate, mammal, amphibian, reptile, and fish collections (Carrera et al. 2020). After QCAZI, the MEPN museum likely holds the second most important invertebrate collection in the country. The MEPN invertebrate collection preserves more than 10 million invertebrates in collection jars. It is well represented by canopy fogging and aquatic invertebrate samples but there is no catalog. Thus, an analysis of the updated QCAZI and the new MEPN catalogs provide us with important insights into the development of the study of invertebrates in Ecuador in the last decade.

Materials and methods
In this work, we update the 2008 dataset to include the new type specimens deposited at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (QCAZI) museum after 2008 and up to 2020 and, for the first-time, list the type specimens stored in the Museum at Escuela Politécnica Nacional (MEPN), in Quito. Type specimens from other countries hosted in both museums have also been included. Errors of type designation that were included in the 2008 dataset have been excluded from the list in this update. Finally, type names misspelled in the 2008 dataset have been corrected.
We compiled specimens for this list by gathering all recent entries of type specimens: holotype, paratypes, and allotypes (i.e., paratypes of the sex opposite to that of the holotype) in the QCAZI and MEPN collections. We also searched all cabinets at both museums for invertebrate type specimens. Additionally, we searched for invertebrate type specimens in the primary literature using online search engines. Coordinates to the localities were extracted; localities with no coordinates or with incorrect information were georeferenced using the Google Earth Engine and the locality database from the QCAZI Museum hosted at Bioweb (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador 2021).

Results
The new list of type material includes 2281 type specimens from 307 holotypes, 1910 paratypes, and 64 allotypes ( Table 1). The specimens belong to four phyla, eight classes, 21 orders, 73 families, 156 genera, and 454 species or subspecies. A species accumulation curve of the complete datasets (2008 and 2020) shows a continuing increase in the number of Ecuadorian species described since 1978 ( Fig. 1); for example, in the last five years, type specimens of 182 new invertebrate species were deposited at these two museums. We provide verbatim label information for all new type material in the Suppl. material 1.
A map of type localities (Fig. 2) shows an increase of collection points compared to the ones published in Donoso et al. (2009). The new type specimens are distributed in all 24 provinces of Ecuador. Napo (96 spp.), Cotopaxi (93 spp.), and Pichincha (63 spp.) are the provinces with the highest number of new registered types. However, there are several provinces where more studies are required; this is the case for Bolívar (1 sp.), Cañar (2 spp.), El Oro (1 sp.), and Guayas (3 spp.), among others. Table 2 provides information for 71 type specimens (from 23 species or subspecies) from countries other than Ecuador.

Family Sphaeroceridae
Druciatus tricetus Marshall, 1995 should be replaced with Druciatus trisetus Marshall, 1995 major roads of the country; except those found within Yasuni National Park (Fig. 3). 59% of localities provided type specimens for both 2008 and 2020 datasets. 19% of localities are new providers of type specimens, and the remaining 22% of localities provided type specimens for only the 2008 dataset. Insecta and Arachnida are the most abundant classes in the catalog. Insecta comprises eight orders, 43 families, 108 genera, and 327 species. From these, Diptera, with 1,473 type specimens, provides 65% of all types. In particular, Drosophilidae (71 species) and Sphaeroceridae (47 species) are the best-represented families in our catalog. Arachnida comprises seven orders, 20 families, 34 genera, and 111 species. Finally, we corrected information provided in the 2008 dataset, by removing nine species wrongly identified as type material (Table 3) and by correcting spelling mistakes in the names of four species (Table 4).

Discussion
The updated catalog endorses these two museums as benchmarks in invertebrate conservation at the national and international levels. The four largest orders of Insecta, Coleoptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera, and Lepidoptera that are highly diverse globally, are the focus of the highest number of studies in the country and are the best-represented insect groups in both collections. For example, Moret and Murienne (2020) described 25 carabid species of Andean Ecuador. Lonsdale and Marshall (2006 increased our understanding of Clusiidae dipterans in Ecuador with 21 new species. Since 2011, Adriano Kury, at the Museu Nacional at Rio de Janeiro (MNRJ, Brazil) has considerably curated the Opiliones collection at QCAZI museum (Kury 2012;Giupponi and Kury 2015). Unfortunately, a great number of these specimens were burned in the 2018 fire at the MNRJ (Kury et al. 2018) and it is only recently that some of these losses have been contextualized (Medrano et al. 2022).
The Arachnida collections in Ecuador are currently one of the best-represented and the most exhaustively studied. 90% of the Aranea species were described by Nadine Dupérré and Elicio Tapia in several publications as part of their project on a survey of Ecuadorian spiders (Dupérré 2022;Dupérré and Tapia 2020a). Pichincha, Cotopaxi, and Napo provinces are again reported as the most explored, and the invertebrates of many localities already listed in the 2008 catalog (e.g., Reserva Otonga and Estación Científica Yasuni) continue to be studied (Monte and Mascagni 2012;Erwin and Henry 2017;Flowers 2018). The southern provinces of Ecuador are starting to appear, i.e., Cajanuma, at the Parque Nacional Podocarpus, in Loja, where 19 species of Diptera: Drosophilidae were discovered and described by Peñafiel and Rafael (2018a, b, c;2019a, b).
Taxonomists' roles in studying invertebrates is crucial to increase biodiversity knowledge and promote its conservation. The lack of specialists in our country devoted to the study of taxonomy and the diversity of abundant and complex invertebrates prevents the rapid development of this subject needed for our region. In most cases, the specimens need to be sent out for identification to specialists overseas, and their studies can last several years. In this race against habitat loss in Ecuador, it is time to become aware and join efforts with government entities and academia to document and conserve our biodiversity in the hopes to achieve health, food, and clean water security, in other words, attain a place suitable for living.