Abstract
Members of the skipper tribe Baorini generally resemble each other and are characterized by dark brown wings with hyaline white spots. These shared characteristics have caused difficulties with revealing the relationships among genera and species in the group, and some conflicting taxonomic views remain unresolved. The present study aims to infer a more comprehensive phylogeny of the tribe using molecular data, to test the monophyly of the tribe as well as the genera it includes in order to clarify their taxonomic status, and finally to revise the current classification of the group. In order to reconstruct a phylogenetic tree, the mitochondrial COI-COII and 16S genes as well as the nuclear EF-1α and 28S genes were analyzed using parsimony, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian inference. The analysis included 67 specimens of 41 species, and we confirmed the monophyly of Baorini, and revealed that 14 genera are well supported. The genus Borbo is separated into three clades: Borbo, Pseudoborbo, and Larsenia gen. nov. We confirmed that Polytremis is polyphyletic and separated into three genera: Polytremis, Zinaida, and Zenonoida gen. nov., and also confirmed that the genus Prusiana is a member of the tribe. Relationships among some genera were strongly supported. For example, Zenonia and Zenonoida were found to be sister taxa, closely related to Zinaida and Iton, while Pelopidas and Baoris were also found to cluster together.
Highlights
The family Hesperiidae, commonly known as skippers or skipper butterflies, comprises approximately 4000 species belonging to 540 genera worldwide [1] and is defined by the following unique morphological character states: an “eye ring”, a wide head, an area of small and specialized scales on the upper side of the hindwing base, and a large thorax, resulting in the mesoscutellum overhanging the metanotum [2]
Voucher specimens representing all sampled species were deposited in the Insect Collection of the South China Agricultural University (SCAU)
The COI-COII (929 bp) region was composed of 703 bp of the COI gene, the entire 70 bp of the intervening tRNAleu, and 156 bp of the COII gene
Summary
The family Hesperiidae, commonly known as skippers or skipper butterflies, comprises approximately 4000 species belonging to 540 genera worldwide [1] and is defined by the following unique morphological character states: an “eye ring”, a wide head, an area of small and specialized scales on the upper side of the hindwing base, and a large thorax, resulting in the mesoscutellum overhanging the metanotum [2]. Of the tribe was strongly supported by both a study using only molecular data [5] as well as another that combined molecular and morphological data [2]
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