Phylogeny and biogeography of the unique snakefly genus Alena Navás, 1916 (Raphidioptera: Raphidiidae)

Caleb Califre Martins,Atilano Contreras-Ramos,Horst Aspöck,Ulrike Aspöck

doi:10.3897/asp.80.e77260

Caleb Califre Martins, Atilano Contreras-Ramos + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3897/asp.80.e77260

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Abstract

The genus Alena Navás, 1916, is considered the most distinct genus of Raphidiidae, because of the uncommon shape of its male genital sclerites and its geographic distribution restricted to the southwestern U.S.A. and western Mexico. Herein, we present a new species of the subgenus Aztekoraphidia U. Aspöck and H. Aspöck, 1970, – Alena (Aztekoraphidia) alanaesp. nov. Based on this discovery we present a detailed morphological study and the first morphological phylogeny of Alena. Our results recover this genus as monophyletic, including the subgenus Aztekoraphidia as sister to a clade composed by the other two monotypic subgenera, Alenas.s. Navás, 1916, and Mexicoraphidia U. Aspöck and H. Aspöck, 1970. We also provide a hypothesis about the biogeographic history of the group, which advocates that species of Alena are strongly associated with central Mexico and their ancestors were probably widely distributed through western North America in the past, of which only a few small groups survived in glacial refuges.

Highlights

Alena Navás, 1916, is a small snakefly genus of the family Raphidiidae, which is restricted to southernmostNorth America, especially western Mexico
1970, species had their external morphology and its genital structures compared in detail
To generate a hypothesis for the biogeographical history of Alena we used the most parsimonious tree topology recovered in the phylogenetic analysis to perform a statistical dispersal–vicariance analysis (S-DIVA) in RASP software (Ronquist 1997; Yu et al 2015)

Summary

Introduction

Alena Navás, 1916, is a small snakefly genus of the family Raphidiidae, which is restricted to southernmost. Despite the molecular phylogeny of Raphidiidae by Haring et al (2011) that recovered. Alena as sister to all Palaearctic Raphidiidae, several previous studies have considered this genus to be sister to all Raphidiidae

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