Geographical distribution of the cryptic species Agrodiaetus alcestis alcestis, A. alcestis karacetinae and A. demavendi (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae) revealed by cytogenetic analysis

Abstract

Abstract. Agrodiaetus alcestis (Zerny, 1932) and A. demavendi (Pfeiffer, 1938) belong to the "brown" complex of the genus Agrodiaetus Hübner, 1822. This complex includes several cryptic species which are extremely uniform in wing colouration and genitalia structure, but have distinct chromosome numbers. In this paper we analyse karyotypes of A. alcestis karacetinae Lukhtanov et Dantchenko, 2002 and A. demavendi in populations from Iran. We demonstrate that A. alcestis karacetinae and A. demavendi are sympatric in the provinces Esfahan, Lorestan, Hamadan, Kurdestan, Kermanshah, and Markazi. The haploid chromosome number of A. alcestis karacetinae is found to be n=19 in all the populations studied. The karyotype of A. demavendi is not stable. The lowest chromosome numbers n=63-67 is observed in the south of the revealed distribution range (provinces Esfahan and Lorestan). The highest chromosome numbers (n=73-74) is found in Northwestern Iran in provinces Kurdestan and Zanjan. We also confi rm that A. alcestis sensu lato appears as a polyphyletic taxon on the Bayesian phylogenetic tree inferred from the mitochondrial COI barcodes and should be most likely divided in two different species: A. alcestis sensu stricto and A. karacetinae. The new data on occurrence of A. admetus and A. ripartii in Iran are discussed.

A new butterfly species from south Russia revealed through chromosomal and molecular analysis of the Polyommatus (Agrodiaetus) damonides complex (Lepidoptera, Lycaenidae)

“…Sequences were aligned using the BioEdit software (Hall 1999) and edited manually. Phylogenetic hypotheses were inferred using Bayesian inference as described previously (Vershinina and Lukhtanov 2010, Lukhtanov et al 2016a, b). Briefly, the Bayesian analysis was performed using the program MrBayes 3.2 (Ronquist et al 2012) with default settings as suggested by Mesquite (Maddison and Maddison 2015): burn-in=0.25, nst=6 (GTR + I + G).…”

Karyosystematics and molecular taxonomy of the anomalous blue butterflies (Lepidoptera, Lycaenidae) from the Balkan Peninsula

“…This transpalearctic species has been known to have a stable karyotype (n=90, including one large, one medium and 88 small elements) throughout its whole distribution range from Spain in the west to the Altai in the east (de Lesse 1960a,b, Kandul 1997, Lukhtanov and Datchenko 2002, Vila et al 2010, Vershinina and Lukhtanov 2010, Przybyłowicz et al 2014). The number n=90 was also found in Polyommatus ripartii pelopi (Coutsis et al 1999), and we confirmed this count for samples from South and Central Greece and from Bulgaria.…”

Chromosomal and mitochondrial diversity in Melitaea didyma complex (Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae): eleven deeply diverged DNA barcode groups in one non-monophyletic species?

“…Mean uncorrected p-distances between haplogroups were calculated in MEGA7 (Kumar et al 2015). Phylogenetic hypotheses were inferred using Bayesian inference (BI) as described previously (Vershinina and Lukhtanov 2010, Talavera et al 2013a,b). Briefly, Bayesian analyses were performed using the program MrBayes 3.1.2 (Huelsenbeck and Ronquist 2001) with default settings as suggested by Mesquite (Maddison and Maddison 2015): burn-in=0.25, nst=6 (GTR + I +G).…”