In addition, two articles published in less than a year, the work now published provides DNA barcodes for the identification of 83 species. These DNA barcodes complement public databases, enabling studies to better understand their role in trophic networks and ecosystems.
Known for their long legs and sometimes mistaken for stinging insects, crane flies, often called giant mosquitoes or blacklegs, are feared unfoundedly. This group of diptera (flies) is called Tipuloidea and includes four families, but only 3 of these are already registered in Portugal. It is one of the most numerous groups of species with more than 15630 species in the world. In the Iberian Peninsula more than 370 species are known, so it is suspected that there are still many species to be recorded in the fauna of Portugal that has gone unnoticed by scientists. Two of the groups that have not gone unnoticed are the group of bats, and the group of birds in whose diet crane flies often appear. It was precisely this need to identify the barcodes of species from these groups contained in the diet of birds and bats that motivated the work now published and that resulted in the addition of 27 species to the national fauna by 2020. The 412 specimens studied were collected in various regions of Portugal and include specimens from the archipelagos of Madeira and the Azores. It was already in July 2021 the addition of 7 more species to the national inventory in a paper that focused on the European fauna of this group.
Distribution datasets have been published in GBIF, totaling 631 records of 102 species, making this information publicly available to the entire community: