Phorid Flies (Insecta: Diptera: Phoridae) of the Nectandra Cloud Forest Reserve in Mid-Elevation Costa Rica

The Costa Rican mid-elevation forests have been found to include some of the richest sites in the world for biodiversity per unit area. We used DNA barcodes to study 28,773 phorid fly specimens that were Malaise-trapped in the Nectandra Cloud Forest Reserve, north of the city of San Ramón, Alajuela, Costa Rica. This survey yielded 1964 BINs (Barcode Index Numbers), with a projected total of 2809, the largest known world phorid fauna. The diversity patterns of phorid flies collected at Nectandra were compared to 133,705 phorid flies collected at four other sites in Área de Conservacíon de Guanacaste in northwestern Costa Rica. All sites were highly diverse but differed significantly in their similarity to Nectandra, with low overlap among sites. Together, the number of BINs in northwestern Costa Rica is projected to exceed the entire described world fauna of Phoridae.