Phylogeny of the Sympetrinae (Odonata: Libellulidae): further evidence of the homoplasious nature of wing venation

Abstract

Sympetrinae is the largest subfamily of the diverse dragonfly family Libellulidae. This subfamily, like most libellulid subfamilies, is defined currently by a few wing venation characters, none of which are synapomorphies for the taxon. In this study, we used DNA sequence data from the nuclear locus elongation factor‐1α and the mitochondrial loci 16S and 12S rRNA, together with 38 wing venation characters, to test the monophyly of the Sympetrinae and several other libellulid subfamilies. No analysis recovered Sympetrinae as monophyletic, partly because of the position of Leucorrhinia (of the subfamily Leucorrhininae) as a strongly supported sister to Sympetrum (of Sympetrinae) in all analyses. The subfamilies Brachydiplactinae, Leucorrhininae, Trameinae and Trithemistinae were also found not to be monophyletic. Libellulinae was the only subfamily supported strongly as monophyletic. Consistency indices and retention indices of wing venation characters used to define various subfamilies were closer to zero than unity, showing that many of these characters were homoplasious, and therefore not useful for a classification scheme within Libellulidae.

Phylogenetic Signal of Subsets of Morphological Characters: A Case Study in the Genus Erythemis (Anisoptera: Libellulidae)

“…3). Our results do not entirely comply with other authors (e.g., Rehn, 2003;Pilgrim & Von Dohlen, 2008), who proposed that wing venation is a highly variable region and provides very poor phylogenetic information. Despite the strong selection pressures that flight performance exerted over these structures (Kesel, 2000), homologies were recovered from these structures.…”

“…Dijkstra & Vick, 2006;Ware et al, 2007;Pilgrim & von Dohlen, 2008;Blanke et al, 2013), Erythemis was not found as a monophyletic group due to the extensive homoplasy and structural variability observed in its diagnostic characters (Dijkstra et al, 2014). In Ertythemis case, aside from the high intra and interspecific variation that most of the characters showed, a large number of the character states are shared with other genera.…”

“…Several authors have studied the phylogenetic relationships in Odonata using different data sets; of these, only a few have included Erythemis in their analysis, but no more than one species of the genus has been included (e.g. Ware et al, 2007;Pilgrim & Von Dohlen, 2008). Specific studies on phylogenetic relationships among Erythemis species, were conducted by Kennedy (1923) and Pinto (2008).…”

<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small;">The classification and diversity of dragonflies and damselflies (Odonata). In: Zhang, Z.-Q. (Ed.) Animal Biodiversity: An Outline of Higher-level Classification and Survey of Taxonomic Richness (Addenda 2013) </span></span>

“…Bechly 1996;. While it may be monophyletic, it does not stand apart from Libellulidae as a whole (Ware et al 2007;Fleck et al 2008b;Pilgrim & von Dohlen 2008). 45.…”

“…Carle et al 2008;Dijkstra & Vick 2006;Fleck et al 2008a;Pilgrim & von Dohlen 2008;Ware et al 2007). Moreover, as any potential outgroup of winged insects lacks wings, wing-based phylogenies and classifications (e.g.…”