Abstract
Recent efforts to catalogue global biodiversity using genetic techniques have uncovered a number of "cryptic" species within morphologically similar populations that had previously been identified as single species. Chlosyne lacinia (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae), with a range extending from the Southwest U.S. to South America, is one of the most phenotypically variable and broadly distributed butterfly species in the New World. We sampled populations of C. lacinia in two temperate locations (California and Arizona) and one tropical location (El Salvador) to determine if cryptic species were present at this scale (temperate vs. tropical). We examined mtDNA sequence variation in COI, COII, the intervening tRNA (Leucine-2), 16S, 12S and an additional intervening tRNA (Valine), accounting for approximately 20% of the mitochondrial genome (3479 bp). Among all C. lacinia individuals, sequence divergence did not exceed 0.0084 compared to a 0.06 estimated divergence between C. lacinia and congener C. leanira. We also found subclade structure which did not clearly correspond to geography or subspecific designation. Though the mitochondrial phylogeny suggests a complex evolutionary history and biogeography, we demonstrate that one C. lacinia species is distributed throughout North and Central America spanning a diverse set of temperate and tropical habitats.
Highlights
Cryptic species, morphologically indistinguishable or highly similar entities found to be distinct species, have become a recent focus of much ecological and evolutionary study since the advent of PCR and molecular ecological approaches (Bickford et al, 2007)
For the concatenated set of 3,479 bp, sequence divergence estimated across C. lacinia individuals never exceeded 0.0084 compared to a divergence of 0.06 between C. leanira and C. lacinia (Table 3)
The COI phylogeny shows another grouping of C. lacinia representing the Mexican individuals (Fig. 3) but the results largely match the patterns shown by the Bayesian and maximum-likelihood analyses of the concatenated set
Summary
Morphologically indistinguishable or highly similar entities found to be distinct species, have become a recent focus of much ecological and evolutionary study since the advent of PCR and molecular ecological approaches (Bickford et al, 2007). The distribution of cryptic species is especially important across large geographic scales. Species thought to be common and widely distributed are instead frequently found to be multiple cryptic species across a range (Jones & van Parijs 1993; Colborn et al, 2001; Hebert et al, 2004; Fernandez et al, 2006; Stuart et al, 2006; Murray et al, 2008; Wheat & Watt 2008; Belyaeva & Taylor, 2009; Geurgas & Rodrigues, 2010; McLeod, 2010). Even when cryptic species are revealed, their own particular distributions are important to consider. Species exhibiting extensive distributions do not necessarily have cryptic associations. Lohman et al (2008) showed that Lampides boeticus (Lepidoptera), a butterfly distributed across four continents, did not have any clear cryptic species complexes across its range
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