Preliminary molecular phylogeny and biogeography of the monobasic subfamily Calinaginae (Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae)

Abstract

Calinaga (Moore 1857) is a rare and enigmatic Asian butterfly genus whose phylogenetic placement within Nymphalidae has only recently been established. The evolutionary history of Calinaga species however remains unknown. Here we explore the phylogeography of Calinaga using 1310 bp of sequence data from two molecular (mtDNA barcode and ribosomal protein S5 nuclear gene) and two morphological traits (genitalia and wing pattern). Within the proposed phylogenetic framework, we estimate the ages of divergence within the genus and reconstruct their historical biogeography. We found strong support for monophyly of Calinaga and support for the most recent accepted species in the genus. Our results indicate that the common ancestor of Calinaga first split in the Eocene (~43 million years ago) in southern China, probably as a consequence of geological and environmental impacts of the collision of the Indian and Asian subcontinents. In the Oligocene/Miocene, the extrusion of Indochina from the continent caused further dramatic orogenetic changes that promoted isolation and speciation events within the genus while Pleistocene climatic changes also influenced the distribution and further speciation. A dispersal-vicariance analysis suggests that vicariance events have played a far more important role than dispersal in the distribution of extant species.

Molecular phylogenetic and morphological studies on the systematic position of Heracula discivitta reveal a new subfamily of Pseudobistonidae (Lepidoptera: Geometroidea)

“…Mysterious taxa, with dubious placements from morphological information, also have been found in some other Lepidopteran lineages, and molecular phylogenetic data have been increasingly applied in addition to morphology to ascertain their systematic status with some particularly successful cases. For example, the systematic position of the rare Asian butterfly genus Calinaga had long been a topic for debate until it was recently verified as a monobasic subfamily Calinaginae in Nymphalidae based mainly on molecular phylogenetic data (Wahlberg, et al ., ; Todisco, et al ., ). The moth tribe Diptychini Janse, with a controversial placement, was demonstrated to be a group of Ennominae in Geometridae using an eight‐gene molecular dataset (Sihvonen et al ., ).…”

DNA barcodes from over-a-century-old type specimens shed light on the taxonomy of a group of rare butterflies (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae: Calinaginae)

“…Despite evidently being a geologically old genus [ 24 , 36 , 37 ], Calinaga does not demonstrate nearly the same degree of species divergence and differentiation that is prevalent in other nymphalid groups of similar age. This pattern is typical of “living fossils”, ancient lineages with one or few living representatives, such as the Mexican Baronia brevicornis , the lone species in a monotypic subfamily that is sister to all other swallowtails [ 38 ].…”

“…To assess the phylogeographic patterns within Calinaga , we complemented the 138 sequences obtained through this study with an additional 51 mtDNA and 24 RpS5 (ribosomal protein S5 nuclear gene) sequences from Todisco et al [ 24 ]. Another five publicly available mtDNA sequences of Calinaga were retrieved from GenBank and added to the dataset.…”

“…A modern large-scale study employing molecular and morphological characters from wing pattern and genitalia of nearly all species (except C . formosana Fruhstorfer [ 24 ]) addressed some of these long-standing issues, highlighting the presence of four main lineages within Calinaga ( C . aborica , C .…”

Evolutionary diversification of montane Atlantic Forest butterflies

“…After the theory of continental drift and plate tectonics (Wegener, 1912), allopatric (vicariance) speciation resulting from the break-up of the continental masses gained more attention and became the main scenario to explain the biogeographical history of tropical clades with disjunct continental distributions (Givnish & Renner, 2004;Humphries & Parenti, 1999;Wiley, 1988). For instance, vicariance was the dominant explanatory process for the distribution of Australian butterflies (Braby et al, 2005;Braby & Pierce, 2007a;De Jong, 2003), Asian butterflies (Todisco et al, 2017), Indo-Pacific Charaxes species and Neotropical butterflies . However, the advent of molecular time-calibrated phylogenies challenged this paradigm, since many clades with disjunct distribution have a more recent estimated divergence time (De Queiroz, 2005).…”