New! Sign up for our free email newsletter.
Science News
from research organizations

Scientists unravel the evolution and relationships for all European butterflies

Date:
June 15, 2020
Source:
Pensoft Publishers
Summary:
For the first time, a complete time-calibrated phylogeny for a large group of invertebrates is published for an entire continent. Scientists provide a diagrammatic hypothesis of the relationships and evolutionary history for all 496 extant European species of butterflies. Their work provides an important tool for evolutionary and ecological research, meant for the use of insect and ecosystem conservation.
Share:
FULL STORY

For the first time, a complete time-calibrated phylogeny for a large group of invertebrates is published for an entire continent.

In a recent research paper in the open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal ZooKeys, a German-Swedish team of scientists provide a diagrammatic hypothesis of the relationships and evolutionary history for all 496 European species of butterflies currently in existence. Their study provides an important tool for evolutionary and ecological research, meant for the use of insect and ecosystem conservation.

In order to analyse the ancestral relationships and history of evolutionary divergence of all European butterflies currently inhabiting the Old continent, the team led by Martin Wiemers -- affiliated with both the Senckenberg German Entomological Institute and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research -- UFZ, mainly used molecular data from already published sources available from NCBI GenBank, but also contributed many new sequences, some from very local endemics for which no molecular data had previously been available.

Butterflies, the spectacular members of the superfamily Papilionoidea, are seen as an important proponent for nature conservation, as they present an excellent indicator group of species, meaning they are capable of inferring the environmental conditions of a particular habitat. All in all, if the local populations of butterflies are thriving, so is their habitat.

Furthermore, butterflies are pollinating insects, which are of particular importance for the survival of humans. There is no doubt they have every right to be recognised as a flagship invertebrate group for conservation.

In recent times, there has been a steady increase in the molecular data available for research, however, those would have been only used for studies restricted either to a selected subset of species, or to small geographic areas. Even though a complete phylogeny of European butterflies was published in 2019, also co-authored by Wiemers, it was not based on a global backbone phylogeny and, therefore, was also not time-calibrated.

In their paper, Wiemers and his team point out that phylogenies are increasingly used across diverse areas of macroecological research, such as studies on large-scale diversity patterns, disentangling historical and contemporary processes, latitudinal diversity gradients or improving species-area relationships. Therefore, this new phylogeny is supposed to help advance further similar ecological research.


Story Source:

Materials provided by Pensoft Publishers. The original story is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Journal Reference:

  1. Martin Wiemers, Nicolas Chazot, Christopher Wheat, Oliver Schweiger, Niklas Wahlberg. A complete time-calibrated multi-gene phylogeny of the European butterflies. ZooKeys, 2020; 938: 97 DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.938.50878

Cite This Page:

Pensoft Publishers. "Scientists unravel the evolution and relationships for all European butterflies." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 15 June 2020. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200615092738.htm>.
Pensoft Publishers. (2020, June 15). Scientists unravel the evolution and relationships for all European butterflies. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 28, 2024 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200615092738.htm
Pensoft Publishers. "Scientists unravel the evolution and relationships for all European butterflies." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200615092738.htm (accessed March 28, 2024).

Explore More

from ScienceDaily

RELATED STORIES