Abstract
Large blue butterflies, Phengaris (Maculinea), are an important focus of endangered-species conservation in Eurasia. Later-instar Phengaris caterpillars live in Myrmica ant nests and exploit the ant colony’s resources, and they are specialized to specific host-ant species. For example, local extinction of P. arion in the U. K. is thought to have been due to the replacement of its host-ant species with a less-suitable congener, as a result of changes in habitat. In Japan, Myrmica kotokui hosts P. teleius and P. arionides caterpillars. We recently showed, however, that the morphological species M. kotokui actually comprises four genetic clades. Therefore, to determine to which group of ants the hosts of these two Japanese Phengaris species belong, we used mitochondrial COI-barcoding of M. kotokui specimens from colonies in the habitats of P. teleius and P. arionides to identify the ant clade actually parasitized by the caterpillars of each species. We found that these two butterfly species parasitize different ant clades within M. kotokui.
Highlights
Caterpillars pupate, the host-ant colonies have suffered serious damage, yet the ants transport these parasites into their nest in their own mandibles
L2 was the dominant clade in the P. teleius grassland habitats (86.2–100%), and in the woodland P. arionides habitat, all ant colonies belonged to the L3 clade (Table 1)
We showed that two Japanese Phengaris butterfly species apparently parasitize the nests of different ant clades within the M. kotokui morphological species
Summary
Caterpillars pupate, the host-ant colonies have suffered serious damage, yet the ants transport these parasites into their nest in their own mandibles. Before the 1980s, it was thought that Phengaris caterpillars could parasitize any Myrmica ant species[13], but in a comprehensive investigation of host specificity among eight Myrmica species and five Phengaris species, Thomas, et al.[5] found a one-to-one association between each ant and butterfly species They found that the survival rate of P. arion caterpillars in nests of M. sabuleti and M. scabrinodis was on average 15% and 2%, respectively[5]. To determine the true host ant of P. teleius and P. arionides, we (1) investigated M. kotokui colonies in the habitats of P. teleius and P. arionides, (2) used DNA barcoding to estimate the frequencies of the different ant clades in each habitat, and (3) identified the ant clade that the caterpillars of each butterfly species parasitized
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