First records of the parthenogenetic Surinam cockroach Pycnoscelus surinamensis (Insecta: Blattodea: Blaberidae) for Central Europe

Sixteen species of cockroaches have been reported for Austria so far. This study is the first record of the parthenogenetic Surinam cockroach, Pycnoscelus surinamensis (L.) for Austria (and thus Central Europe). The species is natively distributed in Indo‐Malaysia but has been unintentionally introduced in many, mainly tropical, countries throughout the world. Sequencing the DNA barcoding region revealed that all Austrian P. surinamensis samples had the same haplotype, which they shared with samples from the United States of America, Guyana and French Polynesia, indicating that all these samples/populations belong to the same clonal lineage. Even though in temperate regions, the occurrence of P. surinamensis is currently limited to greenhouses, we advocate proper monitoring of the populations with respect to global warming and the expected increasing independence of this species from greenhouses that comes along with it.


| INTRODUC TI ON
Cockroaches (Blattodea) are an insect order that comprises many highly adaptable species, some of which are feared as peridomestic pest species that were unintentionally introduced in many countries throughout the world. Even though most of these pest species are of tropic origin, some species such as the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana (Linnaeus 1758), the German cockroach, Blattella germanica (Linnaeus 1758) and the oriental cockroach Blatta orientalis (Linnaeus 1758) even established populations in temperate regions (Cochran, 1999).
Sixteen species of cockroaches have been reported for Austria so far (Table 1). Only seven of these species are native to the country and found in the wild and not considered pests. They belong to the family Ectobiidae and are placed in two genera, Ectobius (4 species) and Phyllodromica (3). The remaining nine species, all of which are alien, belong to three families: Ectobiidae (2), Blaberidae (2) and Blattidae (5). Of Nyctibora sp. (Ectobiidae) and Rhyparobia maderae (Fabricius, 1781) (Blaberidae), only one specimen was ever found in Austria (Ebner, 1946). Most of the alien cockroach species are not (yet) present in the wild, but mainly found in synanthropic indoor habitats such as houses, tropical green houses, gardening shops or supermarkets. Several of these species are known to undergo mass reproductions. They can not only destroy and contaminate food reserves, but, because of their potential for transmitting diseases and triggering allergies, might also pose a risk to human health (Baur, Landau Lüscher, Müller, Schmidt, & Coray, 2004;Hubert, Stejskal, Athanassiou, & Throne, 2018;Pospischil, 2010).
Here, we report the first records of the originally tropic Surinam cockroach, P. surinamensis (L.), for Austria and thus Central Europe, which were encountered by chance when capturing P. australasiae at the botanical garden in Graz for a student's course and amongst other cockroaches in the Butterfly House in Vienna.

| MATERIAL AND ME THODS
We first discovered the Surinam cockroach in the Tropic House  Information Table S1).

Taxon and author
Red list Note Published in
Following Bourguignon et al. (2018), the tree was rooted with P.

| D ISCUSS I ON
Pycnoscelus surinamensis is the thelytokous descendant of its bisexually reproducing progenitor P. indicus (Linnaeus 1758) (Bourguignon et al., 2018;Roth, 1967). Its parthenogenetic mode of reproduction facilitates a rapid establishment of new populations, with only a single female being sufficient to found a new population.
It is noteworthy that many invasive species are parthenogenetic (e.g., Lombardo & Elkinton, 2017;Gutekunst et al., 2018) and that many taxa for which sexual reproduction is common in the native range, tend to switch to obligate or facultative parthenogenesis in introduced populations (e.g., Dybdahl & Kane, 2005;Caron, Ede, & Sunnucks, 2014). Pycnoscelus surinamensis is no exception as its almost global distribution contrasts the restricted distribution of P. indicus in the Indo-Malayan region (plus some introduced populations in Hawaii and Australia; Roth and Willis, 1960).

Numerous clonal lineages have been reported for P. surinamensis.
This high clonal diversity and the establishment of general purpose genotypes are believed to underlie the species' adaptability and considered one of the main reasons for the species' colonization success (Parker, Selander, Hudson, & Lester, 1977;Niklasson & Parker, 1994 Stephan Koblmüller https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1024-3220