Abstract
The evolution of anopheline mosquitoes (Culicidae: Anophelinae) has been the subject of speculation and study for decades, but a comprehensive phylogeny of these insects is far from complete. The results of phylogenetic studies based on morphological and molecular data sets are conspicuously ambiguous. Here, we revisit the phylogenetic relationships of anopheline mosquitoes using state‐of‐the‐art software and cladistic methods to analyse the data set of Harbach & Kitching (2005). We present a refined interpretation of relationships based on analyses of a revised data set that includes an additional species. Implied weighting analyses were conducted with TNT with the concavity constant K ranging from 1 to 33. We determined the optimal K value by summing the GC supports for each MPC and selected the tree with the highest support, K = 30, as the preferred cladogram. We then collapsed the branches with GC support < 1 to obtain the ‘best’ topography of relationships. Genus Chagasia is the basalmost taxon of Anophelinae, and genus Anopheles is recovered as monophyletic but only if Anopheles implexus is excluded and genus Bironella is subordinated within it. The Afrotropical An. implexus is recovered as the sister to all other anophelines, and Christya Theobald, stat. nov., is elevated from synonymy with Anopheles Meigen as a subgenus to accommodate it. The other anophelines comprise two large clades. The first includes the reciprocally monophyletic subgenera Kerteszia + Nyssorhynchus; the second consists of subgenus Cellia as the sister to a heterogeneous clade that includes genus Bironella and subgenera Anopheles, Baimaia, Lophopodomyia and Stethomyia of genus Anopheles. The sister relationship of Cellia and the heterogeneous clade is lost when the branches with GC <1 are collapsed. The monophyly and non‐monophyly of the informal subordinate taxa of subgenera Nyssorhynchus, Cellia and Anopheles, and also evolutionary scenarios, are discussed in relation to previous studies.
Highlights
Culicidae, mosquitoes, comprise a large and abundant group of 3,543 3,546 formally recongized species with distributions in temperate and tropical regions of the world
Subgenus Cellia and the Sections of subgenera Anopheles and Nyssorhynchus are divided into Series, the larger Series are divided into species Groups, and some Groups are further divided into Subgroups and species Complexes
The Whereas this species was recovered as the sister to subgenera Cellia + (Kerteszia + Nyssorhynchus) in our previous study (Fig. S2), the results of the present analyses shown in Fig. 3 suggest that An. implexus it is sister to all Anophelinae except genus Chagasia, the support for the latter group (GC = 2) is weak
Summary
Mosquitoes, comprise a large and abundant group of 3,543 3,546 formally recongized species with distributions in temperate and tropical regions of the world. Anophelinae comprises three genera: Anopheles Meigen (cosmopolitan, 469 472 species), Bironella Theobald (Australasian, 8 species) and Chagasia Cruz (Neotropical, 5 species) (http://mosquito-taxonomic-inventory.info/). Mosquitoes of these genera are known in the vernacular as “anophelines”. The majority of anopheline species belong to this genus, which comprises seven subgenera: Anopheles s.s. The three largest subgenera, Anopheles, Cellia and Nyssorhynchus, are divided into hierarchical systems of informal taxonomic categories (Reid & Knight 1961; Harbach 1994, 2004). Genus Bironella includes three subgenera, but unlike the larger subgenera of Anopheles, they are not subdivided into informal group taxa. Genus Chagasia is a small homogenous group of species that is not subdivided (Harbach & Howard 2009)
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