Immature stages and adult morphology as a contribution to the phylogeny of the West Palaearctic lycaenid butterflies (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae)

Abstract

SummaryWe test the extent to which the combination of 69 morphological characters from the early stages (18 from the egg, six larval and eight pupal) with 37 adult morphological characters of the lycaenids (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae) improves the results of a parsimony analysis to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the group, using 51 sample species from the West Palaearctic. The results show three main clades, although with low support from bootstrap and jackknife resamplings; they represent the four tribes present in our sample, i.e. Lycaenini, Theclini, Eumaeini and Polyommatini. The tribe Lycaenini (the one that has the highest node support) is in the base of the tree. Theclini + Eumaeini appear as sister clades with the Polyommatini as the sister taxon to both of them. At the lowest taxonomic levels our results are often in agreement with those from recent studies done on a molecular basis. Adding morphological information from the immature stages to that of the adult contributed significantly to increasing the resolution of the resulting cladogram. Our results confirm the idea that combined data matrices (e.g. including information from different life stages) may generally result in more consistent phylogenetic trees than those based in the adult morphology alone.